PDF Editor?

Hardware and technical stuff
1

Wait, stop don’t report this, I have not been taken over by a malware bot! :P

I need to edit a bunch of PDFs. Not so much edit the actual content, just concatenate some documents, delete, insert or re-order pages, etc, prior to having printed.

WTF do I use? Strangely, PDF editing seems to be the only thing I have never managed to find a reliable free/OSS tool for.

Obviouslly searching the web for PDF editors is fraught with the same dangers as looking for video codecs! Or you can only find paid or subscription offerings. Or web only ‘upload and edit your shit’ online kind of jank. Screw all that noise!

There has got to be a decent free OSS PDF editing suite out there, right? Openoffice?

2

I use Not Another PDF Scanner 2 for scanning and saving to PDF. But you can just drop a PDF document into it, and extract pages, rearrange pages or drop multiple documents and concatenate them.

3

Groovy, that seems to have worked a treat for the first thing I had to do. Ta!

4

I have a work provided sub to Adobe Creative Cloud, so I’ve always used that. Which is utter overkill, for what I do.

5

I’m glad it is doing what you need. What you described is the same sort of pdf munging I usually need to do.

6

@Timemaster_Tim solution is superior, but for a quick reorder, I like to use the save-as-PDF function in my browser. You open the PDF in Chrome, select Save as PFD as the Destination, and Custom for the page range. In the little box, enter the range of pages you want. Use commas and dashes to express a range.

Screen Shot 2023-11-11 at 10.35.28 PM
Screen Shot 2023-11-11 at 10.35.28 PM2014×1310 362 KB

7

That’s a pretty slick quick and dirty solution to rearranging and dropping out pages. It’s not as flexible as a dedicated program, but it doesn’t require installing anything if you are already running Chrome.

8

Wait, you mean you can switch page order that way? Like, you enter:

1,48,2-47,51,48-50

?

9

I haven’t really tried to do that but maybe some of that might work. I think it would probably barf on the duplicate page 48 in that particular scenario.

Here is a tip: use the preview window to determine the page numbers, not any actual page numbers you might have in a particular document. I have been able to get this trick to do whatever I need for tech reviews, but I am mostly just dropping pages.

10

I use Adobe. It’s expensive but very good.

(Acrobat, not Acrobat reader)

11

This is the kind of thing that regularly makes me happy to have switched back to a Mac for productivity 20ish years ago in the early OS X era. It’s not perfect, of course, but basic stuff like good enough for most people PDF editing is just there & working out of the box.

12

Software is Mac and Windows

Good pay pdf with 1 time unlock v3 is subscription https://www.stacksocial.com/sales/pdf-expert-one-time-purchase-lifetime-license