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Comment by moffkalast | Hacker News Reader

You'd think at this point there would be a dozen solid competitors to Adobe Acrobat. You'd really fuckin think so.

And yet filling out a pdf and signing it with a certificate (aka the bog standard procedure for much of modern bureaucracy) is still too much to ask for any pdf software on linux. It just doesn't exist. How?

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It is similar to the lack of a perfect MS Office with full VBA support, or the lack of well-designed CAD software for 21st century or the lack of industry-grade photography software someone can earn a living from, or the lack of reverse-engineering software that has the exact integration and full capabilities of IDA. It is sufficiently hard to get it right, so people who are smart and determined enough to solve PDF editing problem are asking for a return on their investment.

PDFs are final produce of a rendering process. They don't have nice text or image elements you can move around as a unit. The rendering process explodes the source material into thousands of unconnected objects. Fonts are separated into their glyphs so you need to have legal access to a bunch of very expensive fonts to just to write the correct heuristics. You need good algorithms to reverse the layout and even reverse engineer entire documents to rearrange text content. It is stupidly expensive to develop in and hire for this niche. So nobody will release their very expensive heuristics in the wild.

Btw, closed-source alternatives to Acrobat exist. I like Tracker Software's editors a lot. There is also Foxit and Master PDF. The latter two work under Linux but their UI can be janky since they ship their own UI libraries.

Gnome's Papers and, of course, KDE's Okular sign PDF without a hassle. If you need to edit PDFs, too, MasterPDF [1] is a solid choice. Not quite PDF X-Change in power or Acrobat Pro in looks it is sufficient for daily tasks.

The real obstacle to digitally signing is bad support for Linux by the card reader vendors, as usual.

[1] https://code-industry.net/masterpdfeditor/

For similar reasons that no fully compatible MS Word clone exists: very high complexity of the format, underspecified format details, and undocumented implementation algorithms.

Even if the format is understood, it's also very much a case of Acrobat handling extremely badly formed PDFs instead of erroring out if it were strictly adhering. If you've ever seen a save prompt when making no changes, that happened.

"It works on Acrobat" was something we got told a lot from clients sending us PDFs that were broken according to the official spec - we just had to deal with it.

Yes, and the same is true for MS Word. "Undocumented implementation algorithms" was meant to subsume that aspect.

The best I have found that does this is Master PDF Editor for Linux. Unfortunately not free or open source, but it is good.

https://code-industry.net/masterpdfeditor-help/certificate-m...

Right now the signatures are digital ink, but I plan on adding signatures with certificates so it's more official.

I use Scribus to edit PDfs https://scribus.net

Weird: Your link is broken for me, but typing in exactly the same text to the address bar resolves perfectly.

Is it somehow filtering out referrals from this site?

Looks like they have a cert for https://*.scribus.net, but not for https://scribus.net.

Their link redirected to www.scribus.net for me, perhaps somebody saw this and fixed the config?

I use LibreOffice Draw

Does that do a perfectly accurate import?

Whenever I import PDF's into drawing programs, add something, and then export, something always seems to get messed up.

Whether it's font glyphs, or font spacing, or something to do with layer ordering.

It doesn't except very trivial things.

Why did I never think of this? Thanks!

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