Ubuntu – How to copy from a pdf to another pdf in ubuntu/linux

latexpdf

So Preview for Mac OS X has this capability. I want to be able to just highlight whatever on a pdf, and be able to copy and paste immediately into another pdf file (via the clipboard).

I do a lot in LaTeX, and this would really make things easier why TeXing in ubuntu/linux.

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uPDF is an editor tool to write and paint to an existing pdf file. uPdf can insert pages of another pdf, insert new pages, remove and extract pages, rotate pages, paste a text or an image in the existing pdf, and much more.

You can install it in Ubuntu using ppa. For the moment, as I checked on https://launchpad.net/~atareao/+archive/updf, the uPDF ppa supports only Ubuntu 12.10 and 12.04. To install it, open a terminal and run next commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/updf
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gir1.2-rsvg-2.0 updf

If you use KDE you may also need to install the following dependency:

sudo apt-get install-0.1 gir1.2-appindicator3

More info: Install uPDF (effective pdf editor) in Ubuntu 12.04 /12.10

Another tool for editing pdf files and that can be found in Ubuntu Software Center is Master PDF Editor - a complete solution for view, print and edit PDF and XPS files.

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Ubuntu – How to Edit PDFs

LibreOffice Draw

This impressed me:

sudo apt-get install libreoffice
libreoffice my.pdf

Just open the PDF, edit, and export as PDF.

The editing tools appear in a toolbar at the bottom of the window (took me some time to find it...)

Relevant feature set I have found so far (Ubuntu 13.04, LibreOffice 4.0.2.2):

Remove pages Right click on the page on the left page list > Delete page
Change page order: Drag drop pages on the page list
Edit existing text fields (edit text, formatting and position). Just click twice with the select tool to enter edit mode.
Add new text fields. Choose the text tool at the bottom (T), select the desired text area, and write.
Edit non text fields objects like lines or bullets.
Create fillable PDF forms (Enable the Form* toolbars and be sure to select "Create a PDF Form")

I could not find an extremely convenient highlight method, but you could get away with editing text attributes like setting the colour red and boldface. I could not change the background colour tough.

If I missed good features, please edit and add them!

Here is a screenshot of me editing a PDF exported from this ODT: https://github.com/cirosantilli/media/blob/f3497274fffcb043b9751c903c9fe715a5b023ce/test.odt on 6.4.6.

Of course, as you can see in the screenshot above, PDFs don't have as much information as the original ODT, and e.g. I can only edit one visible line at a time of a paragraph, and the following paragraphs won't "wrap back" to the correct size, since PDFs simply aren't designed to be editable.

Note: I know that it fails for a few type of PDFs, it has already happened to me.

If that is the case for you, please open a minimal, super detailed and reproducible bug report on their bug tracker https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/ so that devs may solve it, and post the link as a comment. When it happened to me I was lazy/inexperienced and didn't do that :-)

Despite this, it was still the best open solution when I last checked, and it works most of the time.

Ubuntu – How to import a pdf in libreoffice? under ubuntu, all pages are blank

If you make sure the scan is 1 page per pdf, you can open en edit it with Gimp.

As long there is no text-recognition done by the scanning software, libre-office or open-office will never be able to do editing.

A simple scan gives you a image (build up by pixels) => editable by gimp

Afterwards it's possible to do text-recognition => editable by libre-office or open-office

It's also possible to make a vector drawing from the image => editable by inkscape

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Ubuntu – How to import a pdf in libreoffice? under ubuntu, all pages are blank

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