Tuesday, June 30, 2009

PDF Highlighting tool


Earlier I talked about few tools for editing PDF files (for free) on linux. You can go through the discussion here. I recently came across some more free tools that tend to make our life little easier, particularly when it comes to editing pdf files on linux. Some of these tools are as follows:
  1. Scribus : Limited capabilities
  2. Inkscape : Limited capabilities
  3. Okular : Limited capabilities. You can do some highlighting and add annotations. But they don't seem to be very neat. Just give a look at some screenshots.
  4. PDF-xchange-viewer. Its a windows based application which is free to download at present and can be run on linux using Wine. I could use it flawlessly on my Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10). Among all pdf editing tools, this seems to the best option for editing pdf files. Even though its not a native linux application, it is better than going back to windows just for editing a PDF file. However, I am still waiting for GNUpdf which, I believe, would provide a permanent relief to linux users in this regard.

    To get started, first use synaptic packet manager to install wine. For Ibex, follow the instructions given at this link. Download PDF-xchange-viewer from its website and run it using wine. That's all. It installs itself within a folder. A screenshot of PDF-xchange-viewer is shown in the adjacent thumbnail. Its really neat and close to what we find in Adobe Acrobat PDF editor.
  5. PDFescape: You can edit PDF files online (particularly fill up forms) at this website. This is useful if you are in a hurry and can't install a PDF editing software on a public machine.

Update: November 10, 2014

Wine does not support PDF-xchange-viewer properly. It crashes frequently. You may think of buying crossover to run PDF-xchange-viewer. Another alternative is to use Master PDF Editor. IT is pretty decent for highlighting and adding texts. It still does not have features to include boxes and circles.  

Installing Master PDF Editor is not very complicated. The following commands worked for me on a Linux Mint 17 machine (copied from here ... ):

$ wget -c http://code-industry.net/public/master-pdf-editor_1.9.25_amd64.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i master-pdf-editor_1.9.25_amd64.deb