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LibreOffice wee
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Now. Why am I wrong for Libre
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this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
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You can edit PDFs on libre?
You can in libreoffice draw for sure.
Yeah but it's pretty limited and personally I could never get it to work, it couldn't handle larger files. Had to pirate some other program to do anything serious.
Are there any good free pdf editors anyway? I’ve always had to use a premium product in the end 😔
LibreOffice Draw is the best in my experience. I edit a lot of pdfs for work and was tired of using an online solution which gave you two free document edits per hour. This was often enough but sometimes it wasn't, and that was annoying. So I tried four or five different offline software solutions for it, and I settled on LibreOffice Draw.
Yeah, similar experience, I’ve also settled on draw. Works fine enough 🤷♀️
Sometimes I use my organization’s ms and adobe products and I just get a little ui envy…
Edit(sometimes I have to)
i mean, pdf's shouldn't be edited. that's the point of pdfs.
I’ll let everyone know
i really wish i could.
If pdfs weren't supposed to be edited, they shouldn't have mistakes that require editing.
They also should've saved the source files that they were created from, but don't worry this PDF dates back 20 years and 3 of the people who maintained its annual updates have since retired, the last person who maintained it left the company on bad terms so good luck!
this is why everything should be in plain text until it has been finalized
I'm sure they thought it was finalized when they put it out.
then complain
Why, when it takes like a second to just fix it and I don't even know who made it?
because pdfs aren't made to be edited and any edit can fuck up the file permanently
editable pdfs would like a word
non-standard extension. should die in a fire.
That word is "bloat".
It's a file on my computer, I'll do with it whatever I want.
then convert it to a proper format until you're ready. editing a pdf is like decompiling and editing an exe file.
What program do you use to convert PDFs, what format do you convert them into for editing?
pdf is a compiled format for typeset text, so you need a pdf compiler. i use latex + tectonic. pandoc is also a popular alternative. "converting for editing" is like decompiling a program, you're not guaranteed to get the same thing back as was put in. i never do that, i recompile instead. if i need text from a pdf i use pdftotext and cross my fingers because the formatting ain't coming back out. any program that does replicate formatting just does a best guess.
I'm not sure if I'm following you - a compiler can be used to edit an existing PDF?
no, you can't edit an existing pdf, the nonstandard form filling extension notwithstanding. you can extract as much information as possible from it and recreate it. that's what "pdf editors" are doing. and since it's not officially supported, any edit can screw the file up.
the reason you can't just edit it is that pdf is basically a container for program code that runs on printers. so you can have text interspersed with formatting information, or text with non-existent characters approximated by vector images, or text that's been rendered to a raster image and is not actually in the document. then you have the fact that pdf can embed specialized fonts, compressed files, security measures, and even internal programs. and it's all offset-based in there so you need to modify the entire file structure in order to get it working again after adding text. what's worse, since any file with a pdf document in it is a valid pdf document according to the spec, less reputable "pdf editors" can just embed whatever shit they want. it's a common malware vector.
it's much safer to re-build the document from source. if you don't have the source, there are tools to extract just the textual content.
Ok, this definitely helps in understanding how PDF works. However, I really do edit PDFs regularly and have no problems with the edited ones. Already mentioned it ITT, PDF-Xchange lets me do so many things that listing them would sound like an advertisement. Editing the existing text tends to mess it up, that's true, but it's not crucial for me and all sorts of other actions work almost perfectly.
You're imagining some very ideal circumstances for working with PDFs that have nothing to do with my own needs, so I can't really make use of your advice. :/
in what circumstance does pdf editing come up regularly?
I frequently download book and journal article PDFs, scan books myself, and upload them online. And ofc read them.
Editing the PDFs in my case includes e.g. adding the outline/bookmarks that allow for easier navigation, adding OCR, cropping, splitting and rearranging the pages when the scanned images aren't ideal, removing watermarks...
that sounds like actual typesetting work! i'm very surprised that you don't get access to the source. usually when uploading to a journal they want the latex source.
I'm not uploading to a journal. I upload stuff e.g. to Internet Archive. When I download stuff from various databases (journals, academic repositories, Google Books), it ranges from recent publications to stuff from several centuries ago, in which case a scan is all you can get.
so in that case i'm guessing it's mostly just pdfs as containers for a series of images. that's frustrating. there should really be a better format for that kind of thing. cbz is the simplest i can think of but that doesn't really allow the same amount of metadata.
Inkscape can also kinda work depending on the PDF? I think libreoffice tends to be better still because inkscape treats text from an imported PDF weirdly iirc
I've yet to find one. Pdf24 is free but not Foss and decent for certain tasks, but it's not a great editor. After using the paid version of xchange for as long as I have, using free options just leaves me disappointed.
How is pdf the standard also?
It’s got way too many features like 3d rendering. It’s proprietary. Simple things like copy and paste from a paper with columns does not work and is basically an unsolved AI problem.
Like, it mostly renders the same, but fonts, OCR, etc are different between viewers, and the official Adobe reader/acrobat are totally enshittified with AI that they don’t work anymore.
At least you can play doom in a pdf.
https://github.com/ading2210/doompdf
Now just need to connect it to a Samsung Smart fridge.
Huh, GitHub is down.
Been working on local stuff all morning.
I hate how it deals with lines in chart grids where it looks like different lines are bolded depending on your zoom level
Yeah, using vector graphics on PDF because you can zoom in and you get into that problem. For big drawings I just look at 100% zoom, otherwise if there's too many lines on small drawings I just make a png instead.
Have you ever tried to look under the hood and interact with a pdf programmatically? I assure you it only gets worse.
A while ago I tried to write a small script to scrape data out of some account statements that my idiot bank only made available in pdf format. As far as I could tell, the file was just a list of tiny chunks of text along with sets of x/y coordinates specifying where each one should be placed on the page. Answering seemingly simple questions like "are these two words on the same line?" Involved comparing raw y-coordinates because the file had no concept of a "line of text", and even spaces between words were often simulated by bumping the x-coordinate over by a few pixels instead of using an actual space character.
I suspect those files were generated by a particularly bad piece of software, and a more competent one could probably do much better, but knowing that its even possible to create a file that cursed is still infuriating to me.
Yup that's how PDFs are. I think the accessibility option one might have something (never tried parsing that).
Plus if you're working with language with diacritics then it's even worse because you can't even compare the coordinates properly, specially if some of them go beyond the previous characters. Not having the space combined with that meant it was really hard to determine the text, and it saves glyph from the font instead of character info too.
Yes, I have looked at evil and I have not been back.
Probably Crystal Reports. It's cursed.
Yeah, don't try to hand-parse a raw PDF. You're better off rendering it and running OCR on the image in most cases. Only exception I know of is if you generated it with LaTeX.
Yes. Might depend on how the PDF was saved or if it's protected, but it can open and export PDF format. Gimp can too, however that would be really more graphics editing as doing text is cumbersome.
Gimp is really bad with exporting large PDFs. Like 60 pages and it crashed my 16gb ram laptop because it ran out of memory after like spending at least an hour.
You can edit pdf in firefox lol
To be fare, you can open PDF in Word and it converts it to editable docx