PDF Editing in Linux

There are very few professional quality PDF editing tools in Linux. There is a "PDF editor" called PDFEdit which does not even have an undo key. Yes, you can do a lot of things (like add text and objects) but you can't go back from any mistake. In other words, a bummer. I like Pdftk which can do such simple things as merge and extract pages from pdf file/s. It is much more useful than PDFEdit. Then there is the PDF import extension for OpenOffice. Unfortunately, it has miles to go. The pictures and text (of the original pdf) appear so out of sync when I use the extension. The formatting looks terrible. For me, the best PDF Editor, by a large measure, is an application not even meant to be used as a PDF Editor. It is called Inkspace and it is a vector graphics (think SVG) editing program.

The formatting stays, the texts are in place, the graphics are not jumbled and adding objects and texts is very easy. It is actually easier to do things in InkSpace than many commercial PDF programs. Unfortunately, there is a huge problem with InkSpace in regards to PDF editing. It can only import one(yes one) page from an existing PDF document. So you need to edit each page separately, save those files and combine them with something like pdftk. One feature request for Inkspace developers is to make Inkspace import all pages from PDF. I believe it is on track and will be implemented soon. After this, Inkspace should be THE choice for anybody wanting to edit PDFs in Linux.