Free Full PDF Editors
If you need full PDF editing capabilities as opposed to annotation the choice of completely free tools is rather limited, but there are a few options you can try which might very well work for you.
- LibreOffice Draw
LibreOffice Draw, which is a part of a Free Open Source LibreOffice suite (a fork of OpenOffice.org), has a native full PDF editing capability. It supports simply opening a PDF file and editing both the text and graphics, and it exports hybrid PDF files which can be edited again natively in LibreOffice, but should otherwise act as normal PDF files.
It is not perfect though, and some PDF files don’t display correctly with images sometimes being out of place and text being displayed incorrectly when the font used is not installed on the system and available to LibreOffice. Regardless of these quirks this might be the best free and full PDF editing option. - Inkscape
Inkscape, another Open Source tool, is primarily a vector graphics editor, but it can import PDF documents that can then be edited in full as if they were vector graphics, and then exported back into a PDF. The limitation is that only one page at a time can be edited, and since everything is converted into vector graphics there is still no true text editing. Text elements are converted into vector text elements, but editing them is buggy. What appears to work best is replacing existing text elements with new ones instead of editing them directly.
To import a PDF file into Inkscape simply open it in Inkscape and you will be greeted by a PDF Import Settings window which allows you to select which page to import for editing, what precision should be used for gradient meshes, whether to replace PDF fonts with closest-named installed fonts and whether to embed images.
It might be possible to use a combination of LibreOffice Draw and Inkscape to get the desired results. One could be used for finer text editing while another could be used for graphics editing. Depending on your needs and the PDF document you have this might save you from having to pay for a commercial PDF editor.
Free PDF Annotation Tools
- If you simply want to add notes, highlight text or add text over the PDF file you’re in luck, as there is a number of decent options.
- Adobe Reader
Clicking on the Comment button on the top right corner opens the ability to add notes or highlight text which can then be saved to the original (or a separate) PDF document. If this is all you need, and already have the Adobe Reader, you’re good to go. - Nitro Reader
If you need more editing options in addition to adding notes and highlighting text Nitro Reader allows you to add text anywhere in the PDF document, fill out forms and add signatures, from its nice tabbed ribbon interface. You can also extract text and images from the PDF file, and create PDF files from other documents (like Office documents, images and so on). - PDFEscape
PDFEscape is a web based tool which offers even more features. While it still doesn’t provide true editing of the original content it allows you to white out certain areas, add text and images, but also add links, form fields, lines, arrows, rectangles, circles and checkmarks. As such it can be a very useful tool for some advanced annotations and filling out forms. - Preview (Mac)
Mac users also have a benefit of a built in Preview application which simultaneously serves as an image viewer and a PDF reader which comes with a number of annotation features from highlighting, text writing (in different fonts and colors), adding circles, rectangles and arrows, and so on.
Mac users can also try Skim as a somewhat more powerful alternative to Preview.
Posted By: Doc CN
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