GNOME’s Evince
is a FLOSS document viewer for Linux and MS Windows.
It handles multiple formats, including PDF.
See also the Debian PDF page.
As of 2018 Dec 31, the latest version is 3.31 (2018 Dec 12).
As of 2018 Apr 1, the version 2.32.0.145 (2010 Sep 27) for MS Windows
was available from the
GNOME Evince Downloads page.
As of 2018 Dec 31, that download is no longer provided. Instead,
two links are given for Windows packages. One of them is broken.
The other,
repo.msys2.org/mingw/i686/,
leads to a long list of .xz files and associated
.xz.sig files, including many versions of Evince.
One can also go to
repo.msys2.org/mingw/x86_64/.
One can download the .xz file for the latest version
(currently 3.28)
and open it with 7-Zip, but it doesn’t contain all of the DLL’s
required to run the .exe file.
As of 2018 Mar 31, version 3.6.1.0 (2012 Oct 15) was available at
csc.warwick.ac.uk; the download was
a .rpm file,
which can be opened with 7-Zip and then browsed to find
the .msi file for Windows
(ref).
As of 2018 Dec 31, the warwick.ac.uk link is broken. Atril
is the fork of Evince for MATE.
As of 2018 Apr 1, the latest version is 1.21.0 (2018 Mar 26).
If the white page background suddenly goes black,
it’s probably because you or your cat have accidentally
pressed the i key, for
Invert colours.
The command doesn’t appear to be in the menus.
There are many other
keyboard shortcuts.
Advanced settings are held in
AppData\Local\SumatraPDF\SumatraPDF-settings.txt.
See
Customizing SumatraPDF 3.5.1 for details.
In version 3.5,
with Settings ► Options ►
Use tabs disabled,
opening a new PDF file by double-clicking
in File Explorer causes some previously opened files to
be opened again. To avoid this behaviour,
change the advanced option
ReuseInstance from false to
truee.
Foxit
(interface takes up too much room, except in Read Mode
in which too few controls are visible, and doing File
► Save As completely obscures all view of the document)
Nitro PDF Reader
(interface takes up too much room, and it failed to display some images
in one document)
Adobe’s proprietary Acrobat Reader can also be used for PDF
under both MS Windows and Unix.
A 64-bit version is not available but it can be run
under 64-bit Debian using i386 architecture support.
It's available for Debian from
deb-multimedia.org,
which itself
is deprecated by Debian.
As of 2015 Nov the latest version, Adobe Acrobat Reader DC,
does automatic updates with no way of controlling them other than
editing the Windows registry or using some special tool, and
after an automatic update it may refuse to open further documents
until the operating system has been rebooted,
which is obviously unacceptable.
Filled PDF forms can also be saved using a print-to-file facility.
OpenOffice/LibreOffice can export as PDF.
A general method is to use a print-to-file facility:
Linux
A print-to-file facility is available naturally
in most Linux installations.
Windows
I have little or no experience with the following, except for
CutePDF Writer which I currently use.
Bullzip PDF Printer: free version of commercial software.
As of 2012 May 1, latest version is dated 2012 Apr 10.
doPDF:
free version of commercial software.
As of 2012 May 1, latest version released ~1 month ago.
CutePDF Writer: free version of commercial software.
Requires a separate PostScript-to-PDF converter such as Ghostscript.
As of 2012 May 1, latest version is dated 2012 Mar 19.
Adobe's
Universal PostScript Windows Driver can be used with
a separate PostScript-to-PDF converter such as Ghostscript.
As of 2012 May 1, latest version is dated 2002 May 23.
Xournal is
‘an application for notetaking, sketching,
keeping a journal using a stylus’ but it also can import
PDF files and then export them with annotations, including
highlighting, adding text and (starting with version 0.4.7) images,
and freeform drawing.
The annotations
are not ‘real’ PDF annotations (movable, hideable,
removable, etc.)
but are useful for many purposes.
Xournal is open-source and multiplatform.
The file format is gzipped XML-like plain text, which makes it
possible to fix things like accidentally deleting a page or
changing its background when annotating a PDF file.
When I tried it under Windows, the default font acted oddly
but when I switched to another font it was fine.
As of 2017 Oct 21, the latest distributed version is
0.4.8.2016 dated 2017 Jul 20. Xournalpp
is a rewrite in C++, designed for tablets. As of 2017 Oct 21,
the latest version is 1.0.0 dated 2014 Feb 8; minor changes have
been made as recently as 2017 Oct 13. I haven't tried it.
Inkscape can open PDF files
for editing. As of version 1.2, it can also
Open or Import,
merge; and Save multi-page PDF files
(ref).
You can also Export multi-page PDF files
but you get either one file per page or one page with all of the
original pages side by side.
In the toolbar there is a new Pages Tool
that can create, reorder and delete pages, and can also
change the sizes and orientations of individual pages.
PDFedit
‘is a free open source [GPL] pdf editor and a library
for manipulating PDF documents’. As of 2021 Oct 16, the
latest release is dated 2014 May 26.
At least as of 2012 Mar, the Linux version was based
on Qt 3 but the Windows version was based on Qt4; the two versions
were apparently going to merge. With the 2012 Windows version I was
able to apply annotations (comment bubbles) and highlighting, but
the application froze when I tried to add text.
The .msi installer installs the
Pdfedit directory directly in C:\ by default.
It is necessary to provide 32-bit copies of
msvcp100.dll and msvcr100.dll, which I got from
C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\x86\.
Okular from the KDE project
handles both forms and annotation. Okular annotations can only
be read by Okular.
Okular is open-source and multiplatform.
As of 2021 Oct 16, the latest stable release is 21.08.2 dated 2021 Oct 7.
Foxit Reader is a free
commercial PDF reader for MS Windows that permits annotation and the saving of
filled PDF forms.
An old (2009) Linux version is available but it doesn't do any annotation.
Nitro PDF Software
offers free commercial tools for Windows, including
Nitro PDF Reader
(forms, annotation, etc.) and
PrimoPDF (PDF creator).
The fact that excessively large files are created by
the PDF creator was
acknowledged 2010 Jun 3
and is still a problem as of 2011 Jun 12.
The PDF files are images, not text.
BeCyPDFMetaEdit for editing metadata in PDF file (for Windows
latest version 2008 Feb 18, as of 2011 Jul 8)
PDF Split and Merge
by Andrea Vacondio,
an open-source tool for manipulating PDF files: split, merge,
extract, mix, rotate, etc. Written in Java.
When used to split PDF files produced by scanning, the resulting PDF
files are not displayed properly by Acrobat. They are handled well
by both Xournal
and Evince; an export from Xournal seems to lose resolution, but
a print to PDF from Evince creates a good-looking file that's readable
by Acrobat.
Adding line numbers to PDF files
(ref).
My version of scriptdolphin's procedure:
create a 1-page file lineNumbers.odt
containing just line numbers, with margins, line spacing,
font and colour as desired;
export it as lineNumbers-text.pdf; then do
gs -o lineNumbers.ps -sDEVICE=pswrite lineNumbers-text.pdf
gs -o lineNumbers-outlines.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite lineNumbers.ps
In the directory where the PDF file to be numbered lives, do
pdftk name.pdf multibackground path/lineNumbers-outlines.pdf output name_lineNumbers.pdf
Removing bookmarks from a PDF file
(ref): pdftk A=filename.pdf cat A1-end output filename_nobookmarks.pdf