How I interact with PDFs using Free software and Linux in 2025
How I interact with PDFs using Free software and Linux in 2025
neilzone.co.uk
How I interact with PDFs using Free software and Linux in 2025
8 comments
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pdflatex okular pdftk pdfcropTaht's it. You don't need anythitg else
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okular, okular, okular, okular, okular, okular
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I do most of what I need with PDFs with Firefox. Mostly on Windows (because work) but it works just fine on my Macs, probably just as well on Linux. Firefox is free software, too — it's good enough for most. Though your blog does get into some more advanced stuff.
If it's form fillable, I just type. If not, Firefox can insert text. That's most of what I need. We had one document that was oriented wrong — it was made landscape but "printed" to PDF in portrait, so everything was sideways and it confused people. "Just print it, write by hand, and hand deliver it," the sender told people. I printed it to a new PDF, correcting the orientation, and showed people how to type in it (it's not form fillable). Made part of our job a lot easier. Better still if I could make it form fillable, most likely by recreating it from scratch. Wouldn't be hard to do, but I try to stay in my lane.
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We had one document that was oriented wrong — it was made landscape but "printed" to PDF in portrait, so everything was sideways and it confused people. "Just print it, write by hand, and hand deliver it," the sender told people.
I'm guessing the confused people were confused by many otherwise simple tasks as well...
Some people are utterly hopeless when it comes to tech.
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They are, but it's nice to help others. It's genuinely nice to be helpful, but it's also useful to be useful.
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I use Gnome’s default tool, evince, also known as “Document Viewer”.
I do believe the default these days is something called "papers"?
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Apparently so. It's probably going to depend on distro, when that distro was installed and potentially also user preferences if they've installed something they found familiar instead of using a new default.
Those of us on older Linux Mints, for example, might have had Evince as the default, but now the default is Mint's own Xreader, an Evince fork.
That's presumably either because it was forked before Papers was a thing or because Papers has the enforced GNOME interface making Evince a better starting point.
I don't even think about it. Double-click a PDF and Xviewer starts up and works perfectly.
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8 comments
OnlyOffice recently added a top-notch PDF editor which I believe is the most fully-featured FOSS alternative to Adobe Acrobat right now. It's available on Flathub.