PDF

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Portable Document Format (PDF) , see PDF on Wikipedia.

Contents

PDF Viewers / Readers
Annotation tools
Editors / Generators
Other Tools
See Also

PDF Viewers / Readers

Debian has multiple PDF viewers packaged, including:

atril - for MATE desktop
evince - for GNOME desktop
mupdf - for any X window manager (no extra features)
okular - for KDE 4/Plasma 5 desktop
qpdfview - tabbed document viewer - QT
viewpdf.app - for GNUstep environment
xpdf - for advanced features other X window managers (no extra features)
zathura - zathura is a document viewer with a minimalistic and space saving interface.

There are other PDF viewers available in Debian.

Adobe Acrobat Reader (Non-Free)

$/!\$ Adobe discontinued support for Acrobat Reader on Linux in 2013, so the only version that is available for Linux contains critical security vulnerabilities and should not be used. The Wine tool can be used to run Adobe Acrobat Reader DC for Windows on Linux.

Insecure obsolete Linux version

If you really need the insecure obsolete Linux version of Adobe's Acrobat Reader, which is non-free, it is available from ftp.adobe.com or the deb-multimedia.org repository.

$/!\$ installing the .deb from ftp.adobe.com does not work with amd64/jessie due to a libgtk dependency error

Note that Adobe Acrobat requires the i386 architecture. If you are running on a non-i386 system, you will need to add i386 architecture support.

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

For Squeeze, add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list (see SourcesList):

# deb-multimedia (unofficial): Debian 6.0 (Squeeze)
deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org squeeze main non-free

This repository isn't "official" but it works and has some otherwise unavailable packages.

After this, type in a terminal:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install acroread mozilla-acroread

In Firefox, you can type in:

about:plugins

and check that the plugin is recognized:

File name nppdf.so
- application/pdf Portable Document Format pdf
- application/vnd.fdf Acrobat Forms Data Format fdf
- application/vnd.adobe.xfdf XML Version of Acrobat Forms Data Format xfdf
- application/vnd.adobe.xdp+xml Acrobat XML Data Package xdp
- application/vnd.adobe.xfd+xml Adobe FormFlow99 Data File xfd

$/!\$ To install acroread-plugin, you have to un-install the xine-ui package and vice-versa.

Annotation tools

Unlike editors, annotation tool can only add text, images and notes without changing existing contents.

xournal - a note-taking tool with the ability to annotate PDFs

Editors / Generators

cups-pdf is a virtual printer that can generate a PDF from any application
gimp automatically convert the imported PDF as bitmap
gscan2pdf - A GUI to produce PDFs from scanned documents
inkscape can import, edit and export PDF (more on inkscape.org)
libreoffice can edit PDF and export it in this format using Libreoffice Draw.
pdfedit was an editor for manipulating PDF documents; it is no longer available in debian
pdftk is a command line editor for manipulating PDF documents
php-fpdf - FPDF is a PHP class which allows to generate PDF files with PHP

Other Tools

chm2pdf - Converts CHM files into PDF files
htmldoc - HTML processor that generates indexed HTML, PS, and PDF
qpdf - tools for transforming and inspecting PDF files
pdf2svg - converts PDF documents to SVG files (one per page)
pdfmod - can rotate, extract, remove and reorder pages from multiple documents via drag and drop; edit the title, subject, author and keywords
pdfsam - PDF Split and Merge is a very simple, easy to use, free, open source utility to split and merge pdf files (simple graphical interface).
pdfshuffler is a tool for shuffling the pages within PDF documents and merging PDF documents
poppler-utils - Portable Document Format (PDF) suite -- utilities
rst2pdf - reStructuredText to PDF renderer