Good open source alternative to Adobe Acrobat?

Muahahaha

Anyone know of a good reliable open source alternative to Acrobat? Im hoping to find something that can combine pdfs into one file and then organise them by chronological order of when the files were created. Ability to scan to pdf and then edit would be a bonus

Johnboy1951

There are lots of very good PDF utilities, but most are command line tools it seems.

There are GUI 'wrappers' for some tools, but I have never used them.

https://www.maketecheasier.com/manipulate-pdfs-with-pdf-chain/

This might provide some insight to what is available

https://www.linux.com/learn/master-and-protect-pdf-documents-pdfchain-linux

Maybe you want something more comprehensive such as Scribus?

Muahahaha

I think Scribus is more an InDesign clone? Just looking for a stable alternative to Acrobat. My main bugbear is I cannot merge pdf files into one single searchable file without having to upgrade to Acrobat Pro at a considerable annual cost. There seems to be a fair bit of open source stuff out there that will do this but Im just looking for recommendations on a program that doesnt crash so much

oscarBravo

Do you need a GUI? Stapler is pretty good.

gatewaytechno

I agree with you, Thank you.

L.Jenkins

The following link may be of some use. https://opensource.com/alternatives/adobe-acrobat

gatewaytechno

I completely agree with you, thank you very much for the post.

ElWalrus

I've used PDFsam to do this in the past. The basic (Free) version can be used to merge PDFs pretty well.

Worztron

https://portableapps.com/apps/office/sumatra_pdf_portable

sheepsh4gger

I use Evince

MrMusician18

I've used jpdftweak. They're isn't much of a gui but it is highly functional.

And free!

FishOnABike

For just joining PDF files I've used PDFBinder. It gas a simple drag and drop interface to join multiple PDFs into a single file.

Most scan to PDF utilities save the scanned matter as images embedded in a PDF document. You may not be able to edit the scanned document as text.

Scanning options are usually a choice between preserving layout / appearance by saving pages as an embedded image in the PDF or using optial character recognition saving pages as editable text in the PDF but not preserving layout / appearance in the process.

I've used FreeOCR to output editable text from a scanned image or document.

For editing PDF text I've used AbleWord.

You will probably need to use different tools for different aspects of your document scanning, joining and editing. These ones work for me.

croo

Guys... that was a question from 2 years ago!