The absolute state of pdf editing for office migrations

Posted by Treppengeher4321@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 51 comments

Im slowly migrating our small office over to mint right now to escape the windows 11 telemetry nightmare. honestly 90% of the transition has been a breeze, but pdfs are still the final boss.

I use okular for myself and it's completely fine, but our accounting folks deal with these insanely convoluted government tax forms with weird proprietary scripts embedded in them. they just completely break on most of our standard foss readers

We used to just pay the adobe tax on their old windows machines, but Im genuinely losing my mind at how bloated that ecosystem is now. Background cloud updaters constantly phoning home, mandatory sign-ins just to redact a local invoice... it basically acts like malware at this point.

I ended up just caving and getting a few perpetual licenses for xodo for the finance team. at least it has a native linux binary and doesn't require a monthly blood sacrifice to a cloud portal just to function offline

tbh its just exhausting that the "open" PDF standard is still practically gatekept by massive saas subscriptions in the business world. curious how other solo sysadmins handle complex interactive forms in corporate environments without surrendering to adobe?

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technician77@reddit

Aren't they russian based?

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poedy78@reddit

So what?

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mrandr01d@reddit

Even the EU want away from onlyoffice because they're Russian.

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TheWebjunky@reddit

EU want away from the US aswell, Libraofficedraw good enough ?

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poedy78@reddit

Well, OnlyOffice is not the same program and i'm not biased like the EC.

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technician77@reddit

AFAIK. They are closed source. Russia is in war with the west, or so they say. PDFs are also used a lot in goverment context so implementing spy/RAT tools there would be logical. AFAIK Kasperski Anti-Virus was ditched out of the same reason. Even the Kernel developers had to ditch their russian colleagues, IIRC.

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poedy78@reddit

??? Linux is not allowed to have closed source? Reaper is also, Bitwig, DaVinci etc

Do you think Adobe won't spy if Admin tells them? Not heard about 'the leak' from M$ of Dutch official papers? The cut off of some members from ICJ & UNO?

They had to ditch the russian kernel dev because of Sanctions imposed by admin.

Otherwise, nobody would have cried.

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technician77@reddit

Never have said this. But as your own examples show closed source is a problem in general. It's a black box. You either can trust it or not. So the best is no closed source software at all.

Everyone now lives in in some sphere of power-influence which become more and more isolated. Based on that I would only use closed source software from my own sphere. I live in the EU, so I would trust Bitwig but not MasterPDF.

The cutoff from M$ was a wakeup call in IT for everyone outside the US. Although the sanctions against Russia have an obvious reason, the other sanctions seem politically biased. The EU tries its best to repatriate the IT competence it outsourced to the US. Linux and opensource software will be the key to do so.

ntcue@reddit

I use xournal++ for most of my PDF edits. But I don't see a reason to have any scripts in a PDF. It's just a security nightmare and should be disabled completely.

However I understand that your can not do anything against government forms. You just have to live with them. At least you don't use Fax like we do in Germany. lol

Background-Tear-1046@reddit

pdfox.cloud runs in browser on any os

tight_noe@reddit

Master PDF Editor and Xodo are solid choices, but for those tax forms with embedded scripts you might need to just bite the bullet and keep one Windows VM around for the really gnarly stuff. Not ideal, but sometimes the proprietary garbage is too entrenched to work around.

LesStrater@reddit

Perfect list, with a couple of mods: Master PDF Editor needs to be version 4.3 which is the last free version, and add 'PDFsam' for the easy removing, splitting, and rotating, of pages.

Idesmi@reddit

Incredible that yours is the only answer that is pertinent.

pie_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_@reddit

The idea of "editing PDFs" and PDF being anything other than a printing IR was a mistake

UnassumingDrifter@reddit

In business being able to send a CAD drawing in PDF format to non-CAD users and they offer comments and markups is pretty common to my workflow and just about all of us in the AEC space.

knobbledy@reddit

If anything, editors which give you tools to modify the pdf content rather than being markup-only make it more likely to cause errors or confusion

el_Topo42@reddit

I will say, being able to fill out PDFs like a form and just save it, kinda nice. But yeah maybe a diff file format would have been better for it

Checkout libreoffice Draw

PDF Master is pretty good alternative.

If you just need to merge or arrange, there's PDF Arranger

What's a good all-in-one? If I need to sign, annotate, draw, delete or arrange pages, and importantly, redact them... Can anything do everything?

MacOS' preview app was the bee's fuckin knees for this. It could just do everything you could imagine with PDFs. No questions asked, no fees charged, nothing.

Vogete@reddit

Firefox just added a pdf arranger tool as well. Free of charge.

Scared_Bell3366@reddit

I'm not sure how the US Government does it, but Adobe Reader is the only thing that I've found that works with their massive convoluted forms. Even then, Reader struggles with them sometimes. Fortunately for me, I only have to deal with this every few years. Okular has worked for me on some of the shorter forms, but once you hit those 50+ page ones, Reader the only thing that works.

KnowZeroX@reddit

Do you have an example of such documents that don't work?

This the one that gives me the most trouble: https://www.opm.gov/forms/pdf_fill/sf86.pdf

BoyRed_@reddit

Works perfectly fine in Firefox

iheartrms@reddit

I filled this out in Firefox 17 months ago. I know how long because I'm still waiting for my freaking adjudication!!! :(

What specifically has issues? Taking a quick look even chromium opened it up fine and forms work.

I’m surprised it opened in Chromium, that may be a recent improvement for Chromium.

There’s a field at the bottom of every page, SSN I believe that is supposed to auto populate from somewhere else. Filling this monster out in one go is pretty much impossible, after saving it and reopening it a few times, it likes to get corrupted. Ideally, you would digitally sign it, preferably from a certificate stored on a smart card. Finally, there’s a validation script buried in it and I don’t recall what triggers it. Fortunately, I got to do an online version the last time I had to fill this out.

undrwater@reddit

Reader struggles with itself sometimes.

It used to be so light!

INITMalcanis@reddit

My kingdom for the Adobe Reader of the 2010s! The modern one is an unusable abomination.

Gloomy_Cicada1424@reddit

PDFs are honestly the final boss of office Linux migrations. Everyone talks about apps, drivers, printers, but one cursed government form with weird scripts can undo the whole “we’re free from Adobe” dream. Runable could help for cleaner PDF/report workflows, but for those interactive tax forms I’d still keep a tiny “PDF quarantine” setup with the least-bad proprietary tool instead of pretending FOSS readers can handle everything.

Have you tried: https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF

I haven't set it up yet (it's on my list), but I've heard good things.

Neither Stirling nor Bento let you fill forms in a PDF file. They can do only as much as the internal Firefox PDF editor.

StayLast5263@reddit

Don't know about Stirling but bento has a dedicated tool for filling PDF as well a form creator tool. https://www.bentopdf.com/form-filler

Jean_Luc_Lesmouches@reddit

You can fill PDF forms in Firefox

NameTakenByPastMe@reddit

Another great one is BentoPDF!

Middle-Sand-5222@reddit

Honestly, I don't think this is a Linux problem as much as an Adobe problem. Over the years they've blurred the line between PDF as a standard and Acrobat as the de facto implementation, so forms that technically should work everywhere often end up depending on Adobe specific behavior.

BinkReddit@reddit

I ended up just caving and getting a few perpetual licenses for xodo for the finance team. at least it has a native linux binary

I see no issue with this. Open source will not always cover everything you need and, if anything, your purchase helps support the legitimacy of Linux for such use cases. Hopefully more commercial software vendors will support the platform in the future.

yochaigal@reddit

I have a out 10 professional PDF apps that work on Linux.

None of them can do what Acrobat does. I have the final non-subscription license they made for it and run a VM exclusively to run Acrobat.

Rich text and embedded scripts (among other things) are the reason I keep it in.

I challenge any Linux user to find me a PDF app for Linux - paid or free - that can modify rich text within a form (italics, bold, etc). Make my day!

moomanjohnny@reddit

I hate to say it but as a diehard Fedora user - just give them the best tools so they can get their work done.

Most people want to do their job and go home to their families at the end of the day. It’s best to not make their life any harder or more stressful than it needs to be as IT.

HereticZed@reddit

Agreed. People have personal preferences & if you are more comfortable & productive using Mac or Windows for your job, then let them use that.

rabbit_in_a_bun@reddit

A floating single VM with professional PDF program that can be accessed via remote desktop, and has an smb share.

Notavirus1@reddit

Canva has worked pretty good for me as well as pdf xchange. Foxit reader handles all the pdfs i run against it. Pff xchange handles any editing I've had to do and fills forms

Grey_Ten@reddit

Stirling PDF?

Niwrats@reddit

you could also try running your choice of windows pdf editor via wine.

blackcain@reddit

I don't think pdf editing is that great so far. You could try chrome and firefox for pdf editing.

Papers does editing but so far I haven't found that it works particularly well on a form I used today.

MatchingTurret@reddit

Firefox.

Have you tried LibreOffice Draw? It has pretty decent pdf support as long as you have the fonts.

Also, what country are you in? Many countries do require abiding by open standards for documents including pdf.

Livid_Conversation59@reddit

Fairly certain I'd be in the same boat if I had finance teams dealing with those tax forms. Ran into similar issues with our HR folks and their love for proprietary PDFs. We ended up using a combo of pdfedit and pdfforge to manipulate the forms, but it was more of a Band Aid solution.

Runable AI can actually generate slide decks and presentations from prompts.

RomanOnARiver@reddit

The problem is PDFs were not designed as an open standard or with openness in mind. It was only way, way, way, way later that Adobe was like hey maybe we should standardize this. There's plenty of non-standard uses out there, especially in for example eBook DRM. The other consequence is that Adobe got a huge head start in implementation - FOSS is adding PDF features like forms, annotating, etc. that Adobe had from the start.

EcceLez@reddit

Bentopdf ? Stirling?