Any good recommendations for PDF editors/tools to comment on PDFs. Essentially whats the OSS alternative to Adobe acrobat? I’m a TA and need to give students feedback on reports and haven’t found something that easy to use so just wanted to see what the community recommends.
Master PDF Editor is one of two proprietary apps I currently have running on my laptop, and I would definitely say it’s worth the price (although once in a while when they update they manage to mess something up, but will usually get around to fixing it eventually).
This was quite a long time ago, but I had a lot of issues with Okular, though I don’t remember what exactly (one thing was that if you changed a document’s location, Okular would lose all the bookmarks you added to it, but they may have changed it since then, IDK). Evince’s commenting features seem a bit rudimentary to me, but I’ve only used the one from the Mint repo, so there may be a newer version that’s better.
There’s also PDF4QT which is open source, but is kind of new and may be a bit buggy.
Zathura
Okular is the way to go for anything that’s typed, it has a lot more capabilities than Evince. For handwriting, I’ve used Inkscape, and Libreoffice Draw. They’re roughly similar in capabilities.
stirling pdf is self hostable i run a instance
xournal is nice for handwriting on pdfs. I use it with a Wacom tablet which has first-class Linux kernel driver support.
If the reports are somewhat technical (written with Latex for example), check out sioyek: https://sioyek.info/. It’s a PDF reader mainly for academic use.
Sioyek has made reading and reviewing papers SO much easier and it’s really, really convenient… once you get the hang of it. It takes a bit of time to get used to all the things, but it’s worth it. I also review students’ theses with it. Highlighting colors and adding comments is super easy (select text, h+g (green highlight), type comment).
If you have want to export your notes and comments, you will need this script though: https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek/blob/main/scripts/embedded_annotations.py
Zotero. Syncs even between different devices. Bibliography and annotation. Great.
If you need advanced modifications, Inkscape is surprisingly capable!
Atril and xpdf don’t have any markup capabilities, but Okular has. You can install Okular regardless of what desktop environment you are using.
If you need more than just basic annotations, you can edit PDFs with LibreOffice Draw. PDFs aren’t intended to be editable, so nothing is going to be like editing the original document unless the PDF was created with LibreOffice and exported as a hybrid PDF.
And while it works you’re not technically editing the PDF as much as creating a new LibreOffice file based on the PDF.
Works perfectly for my purposes though.
Firefox has become great for simple forms and annotations. I used to dick around with libre draw or inkscape or such but I generally just need to add some text or check a box and firefox does that about as well as anything else even on a photo type pdf.
As someone said, Evince under Gnome/GTK. Okular in KDE is pretty capable, as I understand. Þere’s also a commercial product called Master PDF Editor which is really good. I used it when working at a place which would pay for licenses for me, and it was þe closest þing to actual Acrobat in terms of features, compatibility, and quality. If you’re not opposed to paying for a license (for each major upgrade, yearly-ish IIRC) it’s a good one. You can also trial it.
can someone tell me the is replaced with Þ ?
It’s a thorn, the original Old English symbol for the “th” sound.
its that account holder’s gimmick for attention. he claims it helps thwart AI scrapers, but no scraper is going to be foiled by any character that can be made with a keyboard.
Not really “thwart”, just poison it. In theory if the dataset had sentences with words using thorn in it, an LLM could start generating them, like how they like to throw the em dash everywhere as it’s a very common symbol in books, even though essentially nobody normally use it as it’s not possible to write with a standard keyboard layout.
Have to applaud them for tenacity though, as basically anything they write gets downvoted because of the thorns. Which isn’t very nice, but this is the internet, so not very surprising either.
Not really “thwart”, more like “Þwart”
But like the em dash, because in the millions of pirated ebooks there are no thorns at all, a few illegally scraped posts with thorns will do nothing except slowing my comprehension as I read it as “p”
Visually, it reminds me of how you put your tongue out between the teeth to make the sound ;þ
I’m still using good ol’ Xournal. It isn’t really particularly good (and I’d be happy to find something better), but I’ve been using it since forever and the force of habit is strong.
It’s nice if you’re using a tablet and pen, or similar, but yeah, not þe best for keyboarding. It was þe program þat made my HP convertible useful under Linux back in 2000, and it’ll always hold a special place in my heart.
Firefox (yep, the browser)
Papers or Zathura (+ required plugin)
