Free PDF editor for Windows

Question

I work for a non-profit organization and we have a lot of staff that need to work with PDFs. Our designers etc have the Adobe suite, but that is quite expensive, and I do not want to purchase a lot of licenses for the occasional user. We are using mainly Windows-based PCs (and some from Apple).

We need the editor mainly to edit text like adding or deleting a paragraph, rearrange words, fix typos, etc. Nothing too fancy.

I do not want to use an online tool. It has to be 100% offline (after download).

By looking around the net, I found some free PDF editing software; the best seemed to be:

• LibreOffice Draw
• OpenOffice Draw

I tested LibreOffice and it does an okay job with text only PDFs. The main drawback is that LibreOffice cannot handle all images well. Some pictures etc get skewed or misplaced. It also seems that all fonts need to be installed on the system or it will replace it with another one. Other minor annoyances I found include that one cannot just save the file. You have to export it as a new PDF each time (but good for versioning). One also has to install the entire suite to get this one function.

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Is there any free, offline, true PDF editor that is easy to use?

Answer 1

I know two solutions for this:

1. Convert PDF to some other editable format and convert it back
2. Use LibreOffice Draw

Solution 1 If you could not find an PDF editor that you like, then, you can convert your documents to some other editable format, and later, convert it back.

For that, I would recommend you to use Pandoc

You can convert PDF (through LaTeX) to any other format, such as HTML or ODF (you can edit that with LibreOffice), then convert it back to HTML.

Check out the Wikipedia page.

Solution 2 I still would recommend you to use LibreOffice. You actually don't have to install the whole suite, that is, if your not using Mac OS.

This is an answer from Ask LibreOffice:

The answer to this question varies slightly by operating system. In general, though: Most of LibreOffice is contained in just one executable and downloading or installing only some components does not save much space on the hard drive.

Windows: You have to download the whole package, but you can choose to install only certain applications. To do this, choose the Install Type "Custom" on the third page of the installer, click "Next" and then select the applications you want.

Linux: Most Linux distributions come with most parts of LibreOffice installed, Ubuntu for example only lacks the database component by default. You can install and uninstall individual components through your package manager. On Ubuntu and Debian, those packages are libreoffice-writer, libreoffice-calc, libreoffice-draw etc.

Mac OS: You need to download the whole package and it is not possible to select which applications to install.

Here's what NDTV Gadgets said:

For those who use Windows, Mac or Linux, LibreOffice Draw may be the best program for editing text in PDF files. LibreOffice is a full office suite and you'll have to download the setup file for the whole suite to use Draw. Fortunately, during installation the program lets you select the software you want to install. This means that you can install Draw without installing all the other apps in the office suite.

Answer 2

You can try:

• Inkscape
• Free PDF Editor (supports *.fpe files)

Linux (you can always emulate it or use it from live CD such as Knoppix or using Docker):

• pdfedit

Not editors, but have some functions to do some minor changes to PDF files:

• PDF-XChange Viewer
• jPDFTweak

Other solution could include:

• AbiWord by importing PDF into editable word processing document,
• OpenOffice with PDF Import plugin which does similar as above.

^{Source: Editing a PDF Document at superuser}

Alternatively you can always use Trial version of Acrobat Pro.

Answer 3

Annotator Xodo is available for desktop, iOS and Android. The reviews on the AppStore are quite positive.

Generally, I recommend reading the Blogpost What's so hard about PDF text extraction? on filingdb.com . It is from July 2020, and it has an associated discussion on Hacker News.

The concluding sentence of the BlogPost is

If the data you are interested in only comes in the PDF format, then it’s important to be aware that this is a deceptively simple-looking problem and that a 100% accurate solution may very well be impossible.

In the Hacker News Discussion, people mentioned the following tools for text extraction:

• Flexpaper
• pdfsandwich
• Konfuzio
• AbbyFIneReader

... but these are not interactive editors.

Another good advice from the discussion:

Always use PDF/A-1a (Tagged PDF) which contains the text in accessible format. For many governments this a legal requirement. With tagged PDF it's easy to get the text out.

Answer 4

If you dont mind command line, PdfCpu works great. Rotate example:

pdfcpu rotate in.pdf 90

Stamp example:

pdfcpu stamp add -p 1 -m text March 'pos:tc, rot:0, sc:1 abs' in.pdf

• https://pdfcpu.io/core/rotate
• https://pdfcpu.io/core/stamp

Answer 5

In the event of editing a PDF file, programs that allow you to edit files in PDF format come to the rescue. One of such programs is SwifDoo PDF, created by SwifDoo Software. Thanks to it, it is possible to edit any file in PDF format. It is also an OCR program that recognizes text and save it in a more digestible form. (I am not currently affiliated with the vendor just mentioned though.)