Explore the realm of open source software as we delve into alternatives to Adobe Acrobat for handling PDFs. Uncover a world of possibilities that offer similar functionalities, without the hefty price tag, and with the added benefit of community support.
Open source PDF readers and editors
PDF, the “portable document format,” seems to be the go-to format for creating and sharing print-ready files, as well as archiving files that originated as print.
- For years, the only name in the game for working with PDF documents was Adobe Acrobat, but today, there are numerous open source PDF applications which have chipped away at this market dominance.
Editing PDFs
Recent versions of LibreOffice Draw do a fantastic job of editing PDF files, and not just adding and deleting pages as you might expect, but for editing text and images as well.
- Inkscape, too, does a good job with opening documents created elsewhere.
Reading PDFs
Firefox and Chromium, the open source versions of Google’s Chrome browser, come bundled with in-browser PDF readers, so an external plugin is no longer necessary for most users.
- For downloaded files, users of Linux distributions have Evince, a powerful PDF reader that handles most documents quickly and with ease.
Creating PDFs
LibreOffice’s export functionality is the source of 95% of the PDFs created by this method
- Scribus, Inkscape, and GIMP all support native PDF export
- CUPS printing system does a pretty good job of outputting documents as PDFs
