PDF Tools on Linux

Academic lives revolve around PDFs. But it's so tough to find good tools for PDFs on Linux, preferably with a GUI. I keep stumbling on the same old programs that don't work. The idea here is to document programs that did work and those that did not.

PDF Shuffler: did not work. Failed to load a 200+ MB file made of jpg images.

PDFSnip: fork of PDFShuffler. Same problems.

PDF Chain: renamed my pdf, but apart from that wasn't able to do much. Available in the F16 repository and does load PDFs. Could be useful to concatenate pdfs. Has tabs that suggest it can burst them and compress them. Compression does not work.

PDFmod: Did not even boot.

PDFtk: Works really well but this is command line. For rotating individual pages, in a misaligned PDF, it would be awesome to have a visualization tool.

PDFtkforall: Lies. Gui to PDFtk but only for windows users.

PDFmechanic: How does this even work? No instructions. Bleah

jpdftweak: Okay the interface loaded but not a clue how to make this work to rotate individual pages within a PDF!

PDForsell Windows only. 'Nuff said.

So, in short, none of the above worked for me in Fedora 16. Maybe it's time to jump ship to the more pragmatic Ubuntu and abandon the holier-than-though exacerbation of Fedora??

But hang on ...

PDFedit 0.4.5: this one works for rotating individual pages graphically and saving the PDFs. Persistence through bad software has paid off. But has it? Quite inexplicably, the PDFedit package in F16 has been "orphaned" Because the holy Fedora has decided not to support this for F16. There is a workaround (below) to install it. But who knows whether this workaround will make it in the next version of Oooh-I-am-too-bleeding-edge-look-at-me-fedora.

For now, you can install PDFedit on 0.4.5, on F16 by actually installing the F15 version:

yum install pdfedit --releasever=15