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

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.

My recommendation is Xournal and its actively developed fork, Xournal++. Here are the instructions.

Install (for Xournal):

sudo apt-get install xournal

For Xournal++ you can use either the stable PPA,

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:apandada1/xournalpp-stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install xournalpp

or the flatpak,

flatpak install flathub com.github.xournalpp.xournalpp

Run xournal or xournal++, click File>Annotate PDF, choose your PDF file.

Now, go to where you need to add your signature and click Tools>Image (or the "Image" toolbar icon), then click where you want to add the image. An image selection dialog appears, select your image.

Xournal's insert image is a great addition but not polished. As soon as you add the image make sure to resize it and move it to where you want. For resize there's no ability to ensure the proportions stay the same. Just eye it. Once you are done, it is in its own layer, which you cannot change. If you don't like how it ends up delete that layer and start again.

One handy thing is that you can use ctrl-c as soon as you resize it and then ctrl-v the next time you need to insert your image. Assuming you want the same size image this will save you some time.

When you are done choose File->Export to PDF to get it back into the PDF format I assume you'll want for sending your signed doc.

Note: A downside to Xournal is the finished document looks like the fonts are converted to an image. Fonts are no longer as crisp. Still it looks better than if you printed and rescanned and is much faster. [Note: in my most recent experience it seems this problem has been solved. Maybe I just got lucky with the particular fonts used. Please leave a comment abt your experience and I'll update accordingly.] This issue seems to be fixed in Xournal++ version 1.0.20.