Edit PDF files and add highlighting and comments

[rax_m]

I've been using OSS called xournal (http://xournal.sourceforge.net/).
While not a true PDF editor, it allows addition of text and highlighting of text within a PDF. It basically creates a transparent layer on top of a PDF document that you can scribble on to. You can then export that again as a PDF with all the changes.

HTH

[fuzzyworbles]

the free pdf-xchange viewer under wine solution is perfect! thanks. previously i had been running acrobat pro under a windows guest with virtual box. now i only need to put myself through that burden when people send me docx files (which oo simply mangles)

[TreeHugger52]

I find pdfedit to be adequate for my daily reading end editing of pdf's. It's free, open source, and installs directly with the command line:

sudo apt-get install pdfedit

I only use pdfedit for relatively minor editing (highlighting sections of scientific papers, adding minor notes). The gui feel isn't great for my tastes- the developers went out of their way to give it a windows feel. That doesn't appeal to me, but it may appeal to others.

[fsando]

I find pdfedit to be adequate for my daily reading end editing of pdf's. It's free, open source, and installs directly with the command line:

sudo apt-get install pdfedit

I only use pdfedit for relatively minor editing (highlighting sections of scientific papers, adding minor notes). The gui feel isn't great for my tastes- the developers went out of their way to give it a windows feel. That doesn't appeal to me, but it may appeal to others.

I tried it before and gave up on it. Just tried it again after your post and it's too broken for me. Tried a simple yellow marking just to test how it'd look in other viewers but it made the marking black and then crashed so I had to force quit it. This is still very much alpha.

[kokoshmusun]

I'm using Mendeley for highlights and reference management. It's perfect in theory, but beta and buggy. It has messed up my highlights multiple times and I had to re-read what I already processed. It's driving me nuts, so today I decided to abandon it.

While I plan on migrating to bibus or similar for ref management, I still haven't solved the pdf highlighting problem. I'm happy to drop Mendeley (though it's perfect in theory) because it's not FOSS, and I'd rather not use Wine (pdf-xchange-viewer has been praised). Okular made me have to select the highlighting tool everytime I highlighted.

So, I'm really anxious to see a good Linux/Ubuntu pdf highlighter come out. I wish there was something I could do to make the process faster but I don't know programming or anything, but if there is anything I could do, I would volunteer sometime.

[anoop999]

Have you tried Jarnal?
This is a Java program which allows you to load a PDF as 'background', scribble on it, and save it as a new PDF (with a different name).

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/genera...arnal-down.htm

[terryman007]

Try PDF Editor directly from Ubuntu software center....or sourceforge... good stuff maynard!!!

[meral.ch]

Try okular, that one really rocks.

I like flpsed, too. It's very lightweight.

Both these are not overloaded like all the former suggestions. Take a look!

[AbdRahim]

Every time I try to add text it wipes out the image above. How do you use this program?

[fsando]

Every time I try to add text it wipes out the image above. How do you use this program?

Hi AbdRahim

Which program are you referring to?

If it's php-edit I don't know - I tried it out for a period but I never came even close to understanding what was going on, nothing seemed to really work so I gave up.

I can recommend Inkscape for editing single pages. I have used it several times. It sometimes has some trouble getting the fonts right but otherwise works really good.

If you need to create pdf-documents then use Openoffice.

If you need to read already existing texts and annotate them, okular is supposed to work but in my opinion annotation doesn't work very well. Btw okular's annotations are (if I remember correctly) saved in xml-files in .kde/apps/okular (or somewhere in the .kde folder), one xml-file for each pdf-file.