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by bix6 245 days ago
What are people using as a free (edit: or lifetime license) PDF editor for business use / non-technical people? Whenever we try anything else we inevitably run into something we need acrobat for.
3 comments

Acrobat 9.0
I can’t legally buy that anymore and I’d need to downgrade OS to use it anyways?
I have grok produce a precise transcription of the text, then have chatgpt produce an editable word document, including forms, following the text that grok picked up (it's a lot better at OCR, for some reason)

And then if I need to produce another pdf, I export it from Word.

PDFs are silly. It's tech superstition, kinda like the belief that faxes are secure.

We have to manipulate 100 page PDFs, that sounds like a nightmare.

I also can’t run sensitive docs through LLMs. This stuff has to stay local.

Not sure why would anyone edit a pdf. To me this is a format you export to, not a draft/working doc format.
Reorder pages. Redact. Need to make a minor change, and don't have the original. Digitally sign a document. Comment on a document. Join several documents together.

There are a bunch of reasons.

Reordering pages is easily done with the print system of your operating system.

I don't count signing as editing really as the structure and content do not change, you sre just attaching s certificate. Th spanish government offer/maintain an open source java tool to digitally sign pdfs: https://administracionelectronica.gob.es/ctt/clienteafirma https://github.com/ctt-gob-es/clienteafirma/

I've also copy pasted scan of my signature on contracts using Gimp in order to not have to print them, it is fairly easy.

For the rest I would tend to ask first for thread original working document if I don't have it already. Having said that I have edited in a hurry an old cv for my partner using libreoffice draw in the past.

Thank you.

I am constantly mind blown by the lack of awareness around PDF use in business on this board (and O365) lol.

Maybe people gere are more picky whom they are doing business with. I mean if I have to sign a contract I'd rather do it with someone who tend to know what they are doing on a general basis.
Sorry you’re saying someone who uses PDFs is not someone you’ll do business with?
As much as I agree, I've lost track of how often someone's given me a PDF form to fill out. While driving down to the print store during business hours for a scanner is possible, it's a lot easier to make a sacrifice to the dark gods of format abuse instead.
Well I don't really count "filling out a form" as editing as you don't really change the structure, just add stuff in the blanks and any reader such as the one on yoir browser can do it.