17
votes
Free PDF comparison tool
DiffPDF nowadays is an paid software for Windows only, but it was previously free and also available for OS X. You can still download such a previous version.
It allows both visual and textual ...
- 270
14
votes
Accepted
Software to quickly join many JPG images into one PDF without recompressing
img2pdf
Website: https://gitlab.mister-muffin.de/josch/img2pdf/blob/master/README.md
img2pdf is a Python library with a command-line interface, which directly (i.e. losslessly and without ...
- 2,832
13
votes
What can perfectly convert EPUB to PDF?
I personally have always had good results from pandoc but about the only thing that I can think of that will 100% of the time accurately reproduce the onscreen content of an eBook in a PDF file is to ...
- 31.4k
10
votes
Command-line PDF optimizer (linearizer)
I personally use Ghostscript to optimize the size of my PDF files. You can specify an optimization level and it will shrink the pictures. This also has the (IMHO desirable) side-effect of removing ...
10
votes
Accepted
Converting a ADE document (Adobe Digital Editions, acsm) to PDF
You can use Calibre for this, which was already recommended multiple times for book conversion. An Article named DeDRM plugin for calibre describes a plugin to achieve exactly that:
The DeDRM ...
Izzy♦
- 18.8k
9
votes
Is there a free desktop PDF editor?
PDFSam Basic seems to meet your requirements
Free and open-source
Can rotate, cut, merge, save
It is available for Windows and Mac OS X.
PDFSam also have an enhanced paid version with more features....
- 231
9
votes
Lightweight PDF reader on Windows with bare minimum text-highlighting feature
In recent versions (v3.3+) of Sumatra PDF (a frequently praised lightweight PDF viewer on Windows), you can select texts, then press A to highlight it.
You can then save the highlights into the file. ...
- 245
8
votes
Automatically remove white borders from pdfs, no OCR, command line
pdfcrop
Have you checked out pdfcrop?
See: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/gutsy/man1/pdfcrop.1.html
It is described in more details here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/124692/command-line-...
- 291
8
votes
Free for commercial use Java library to convert HTML to PDF
You have a few options:
openhtmltopdf - new code, still brewing, but has some great results
Apache FOP - can convert XML, not HTML, but might be usefull
itext the older version (version 2)
...
- 181
7
votes
Accepted
Is there free or open source software for checking PDF/A compliance?
You can use veraPDF:
open source (veraPDF is dual-licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 or later (GPLv3+) and Mozilla Public License v2 or later (MPLv2+).)
Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft ...
- 37.9k
7
votes
Accepted
PDF anonymizer – remove potentially identifying metadata
For a ready written application you can use ExifTool with a list of parameters that you would like to remove something like:
exiftool -Author= -Creator= name_of_pdf.pdf -o clean.pdf
if you are ...
- 31.4k
7
votes
Accepted
Convert SVG to PDF
Open SVG in browser and print the page to PDF.
Not silent or command line so doesn't meet my requirements
Use cmdlnprint
$ firefox -print "URL"
Addon for Firefox to automate printing ...
- 2,140
6
votes
Is there free or open source software for checking PDF/A compliance?
PDFBox
You might want to check out the (open source) Apache PDFBox library:
https://pdfbox.apache.org
This includes a PDF/A validator (PDF/A-1b only) which is pretty good. I would recommend to check ...
- 171
6
votes
Software to quickly join many JPG images into one PDF without recompressing
PDFJam
PDFJam, part of texlive, is a wrapper script that provides a front-end to the LaTeX pdfpages utility.
This script accepts JPG and PNG images, as well as PDF files, and concatenates them ...
- 625
6
votes
PDF reader with OCR
I use and like PDF Xchange Viewer (now Editor, per the website). It includes OCR capability which will convert the image of text to text (for clean text). I find its annotation capabilities much ...
- 349
6
votes
Software that can extract tables from PDF files
Use pdftables.com.
Sample input:
Output:
5
votes
Free OCR software that makes a PDF searchable (with searchable text at the right place)
I use Microsoft OneNote as OCR tool. On Right click against an image It can copy the entire text in images and It also has the capability to search text with in image. It is free and accurate and runs ...
- 951
5
votes
Simple, free PDF editor for Windows?
For interactive pdf editing I would suggest installing LibreOffice which can edit most pdf files and write pdf files.
Note that pdf files from some sources, such as most scanners and some software, ...
- 31.4k
5
votes
Software that can extract tables from PDF files
ABLE2EXTRACT PDF CONVERTER does this brilliantly well. You can check demo video on their page. The thing I love about this software is (and I think its unique to this product alone):
You can just ...
- 133
5
votes
Python module for converting PDF to text
The python pdfminer2 or pdfminer3k/pdfminer.six for python 3 libraries can extract the text from pdf files that contain text, (note that scanned documents stored as pdf will contain no text or an ...
- 31.4k
5
votes
PDF organizer with virtual hierarchy, fast viewer, highlighting, search
One tool that seems to meet your requirements is Zotero. I recommend it highly. In particular, I've had good experience with it across multiple platforms and web browsers, including Ubuntu with ...
- 161
5
votes
PDF viewer with hyperlink preview
For Linux: Evince / GNOME Document Viewer, at least from version 3.38.0.
For macOS: Skim.
- 51
5
votes
Accepted
Free software for creating fillable PDFs
Open Office lets you embed form elements, and then export the doc as a fillable PDF using FDF to submit.
- 2,450
4
votes
PDF to Word Converter
There are two free web apps that do this quite well:
SmallPDF
Sejda
In particular, Sejda works for up to 200 pages.
4
votes
A free software CV/résumé parser
Given that the tone of your question suggests some programming experience I would suggest that this could probably be achieved in python by:
Converting each CV to a common format, such as markdown or ...
- 31.4k
4
votes
Extract all the highlighted text from a PDF
I first tried the application that was hosted in sourceforge. It is great, but I found one issue that the other than the highlighted text, it has some text appearing extra (leading and trailing parts ...
- 69
4
votes
Free PDF comparison tool
For your use case, comparing the text and discarding all formatting and non-text elements would work well. You can run the pdftotext utility on each file and then a text comparison tool on the result. ...
4
votes
Convert .fountain files to .pdf files
Full disclaimer: I'm the author of Wrap.
I was looking for a tool like that but did not find anything that was easy to use and worked on most major platforms. So I build my own tool called Wrap (...
- 141
4
votes
Free or nearly free PDF library for Java
The Apache PDFBox® library is an open source Java tool for working with PDF documents. This project allows creation of new PDF documents, manipulation of existing documents and the ability to extract ...
- 213
4
votes
Accepted
Lightweight Windows Software for Printing to PDF
I would use PrimoPDF,
PrimoPDF (Free)
PrimoPDF is a handy and lightweight utility that converts just about any file type to a PDF by using the source program that created the file and its Print ...
- 7,705
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible