Alternative to Acrobat 9 Pro, features needed

Greetings all,

after discovering that all the components of Microsoft Office I need, i.e., Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, work for all the features I use, I am now motivated to find a replacement for Acrobat 9 Pro, not in the least for the reason that even on Windows it is no longer supported and, as I understand it, rather insecure.

The features that I absolutely need are the following:

1. The ability to change the page layout, i.e., insert, extract, replace, and delete pages; split the document;
2. Minor editing, namely adding text, like the Typewriter feature;
3. Optical Character Recognition. I need to OCR about 90-95% of the PDF documents I work with, and I have found the built-in OCR engine to be excellent and very convenient. However, I would not mind a stand-alone OCR engine;
4. Ability to fill forms created by third parties.

Would be desirable, but workaround exists:

4. Merge/assemble PDF document(s), this can be accomplished with 1 above;
5. Export to a different format, e.g., text, PostScript;
6. Security and accessibility control, e.g., signature and authentication, limiting ability to alter the document, and the like.

Any recommendation, including, potentially an OCR engine, would be appreciated.

Kindest regards,

M
 
4. Ability to fill forms created by third parties.
graphics/okular can do this.
5. Export to a different format, e.g., text, PostScript;
graphics/poppler-utils has a bunch of CLI tools ( pdftotext, pdftops) that can do this.
1. The ability to change the page layout, i.e., insert, extract, replace, and delete pages; split the document;
2. Minor editing, namely adding text, like the Typewriter feature;
I've had some success with just using LibreOffice Draw (in editors/libreoffice) for this. It can open (and save again) PDF files.
 
Gentlemen,

thank you very much for all the suggestions.

It appears that with the recommended tools, the only missing feature is the minor editing.

Kindest regards,

M
 
Minor editing should work in LibreOffice. Also GIMP may help in many cases, when the searchability is not critical.
 
Back
Top