Any good recommendations for PDF editors/tools to comment on PDFs. Essentially whats the OSS alternative to Adobe acrobat? I’m a TA and need to give students feedback on reports and haven’t found something that easy to use so just wanted to see what the community recommends.
Master PDF Editor is one of two proprietary apps I currently have running on my laptop, and I would definitely say it’s worth the price (although once in a while when they update they manage to mess something up, but will usually get around to fixing it eventually).
This was quite a long time ago, but I had a lot of issues with Okular, though I don’t remember what exactly (one thing was that if you changed a document’s location, Okular would lose all the bookmarks you added to it, but they may have changed it since then, IDK). Evince’s commenting features seem a bit rudimentary to me, but I’ve only used the one from the Mint repo, so there may be a newer version that’s better.
There’s also PDF4QT which is open source, but is kind of new and may be a bit rough around the edges, although it does look promising.
If you need advanced modifications, Inkscape is surprisingly capable!
Atril and xpdf don’t have any markup capabilities, but Okular has. You can install Okular regardless of what desktop environment you are using.
Okular is the way to go for anything that’s typed, it has a lot more capabilities than Evince. For handwriting, I’ve used Inkscape, and Libreoffice Draw. They’re roughly similar in capabilities.
Firefox (yep, the browser)
If you need more than just basic annotations, you can edit PDFs with LibreOffice Draw. PDFs aren’t intended to be editable, so nothing is going to be like editing the original document unless the PDF was created with LibreOffice and exported as a hybrid PDF.
Zathura
Not long after this post, BentoPDF made an appearance
Adobe used to make a linux version of acrobat reader that will probably do the trick. You’re not going to find it on adobe’s download site, but it is still there at the link this tutorial uses. I just checked.
Not what you are looking for… but I work in print and often need to edit pdfs in a much more base level. Inkscape can be a pretty powerful program for that.
‘PDF Arranger’ is a good program if all you need to do is rearrange or combine pages in one or more pdf files.
Papers or Zathura (+ required plugin)
If the reports are somewhat technical (written with Latex for example), check out sioyek: https://sioyek.info/. It’s a PDF reader mainly for academic use.
Sioyek has made reading and reviewing papers SO much easier and it’s really, really convenient… once you get the hang of it. It takes a bit of time to get used to all the things, but it’s worth it. I also review students’ theses with it. Highlighting colors and adding comments is super easy (select text, h+g (green highlight), type comment).
If you have want to export your notes and comments, you will need this script though: https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek/blob/main/scripts/embedded_annotations.py
xournal is nice for handwriting on pdfs. I use it with a Wacom tablet which has first-class Linux kernel driver support.
Zotero. Syncs even between different devices. Bibliography and annotation. Great.
Try evince.
Evince is good.
As someone said, Evince under Gnome/GTK. Okular in KDE is pretty capable, as I understand. Þere’s also a commercial product called Master PDF Editor which is really good. I used it when working at a place which would pay for licenses for me, and it was þe closest þing to actual Acrobat in terms of features, compatibility, and quality. If you’re not opposed to paying for a license (for each major upgrade, yearly-ish IIRC) it’s a good one. You can also trial it.
