Pretty much all of the PDF readers I have tried will work for form filling, however I have some similar issues with all of them.
I mainly use Okular or Atril.
Issue 1 is when filling out multiple fields in a PDF, it becomes extremely slow, to the point of typing some text, and having to wait for 5-10 second for it to show up and I can continue.
Issue 2 is that both Okular and Atril will insert the text with a much larger font size and/or different font than the document. Even in cases where the fields have some pre-populated text, if I touch the field, the font changes. Sometimes the change is significant enough that the text is not readable, or makes surrounding elements not readable.
The best way I have found that works is to use FireFox. The form filling in that works fast and doesn’t mess up the fonts, but the way FireFox handles saving PDFs is tedious. I can’t just click ctrl+s to save, as it prompts me to choose a location to save at and makes me overwrite the original file every time, rather than just editing it in place.
Is there any PDF reader that people are aware of that does not have these issues? Or is this something that is weird with my setup?
I’m running Debian 12 with the KDE Plasma desktop environment
I do a lot of PDF work which requires edits, encryption, etc. Unfortunately the only solution I found that worked for me was a paid one. I use Code Industry’s Master PDF Editor.
I’m not opposed to paying for software, especially if it’s good. I’ll try that out and see how it is. Thanks!
My upvote goes to Master PDF Editor as well. Only PDF reader/editor that can do annotations and notes sufficiently well, in my very personal opinion.
I’ve been a user of Master PDF for years now. It’s my go-to for PDF markup in Linux. Their yearly renewal can be kinda wonky, but their customer service has been excellent.
This isn’t a gui solution and probably is way off from your intentions, but you could use pdftk to dump the fillable field name and pdftk again to populate them with an xfdf file.
edit, I got interested:
#!/bin/bash # Check for required arguments if [ $# -ne 2 ]; then echo "Usage: $0 " exit 1 fi SOURCE_PDF=$1 DEST_PDF=$2 XFDF_FILE=tmp.xfdf # Extract form field names FIELD_NAMES=$(pdftk "$SOURCE_PDF" dump_data_fields | grep "FieldName:" | cut -d ' ' -f2-) # Start XFDF file echo '' > $XFDF_FILE echo '' >> $XFDF_FILE echo '' >> $XFDF_FILE # Prompt for user input for each field for FIELD in $FIELD_NAMES; do read -p "$FIELD: " INPUT echo "$INPUT" >> $XFDF_FILE done # Close XFDF file echo '' >> $XFDF_FILE echo '' >> $XFDF_FILE # Populate the PDF form pdftk "$SOURCE_PDF" fill_form $XFDF_FILE output "$DEST_PDF" # Clean up rm $XFDF_FILE echo "PDF form filled and saved as $DEST_PDF"Either firefox or libreoffice draw
Draw is great, and I’ve been able to use it for most of what I used Acrobat for before, but it has issues with converting certain documents, especially when they have special fonts. Also there’s the issue of not being able to just fill out some fields and then share it back as a PDF
I just screenshot the PDF in fullscreen and then use kolour paint to add in text, it’s worked well for me.
Not really a viable solution for many scenarios though. What if your PDF has half a dozen pages, your answer becomes really tedious. And in a lot of cases a PDF with forms is expected to be sent back to the person or company that created it once the fields have been filled in. They’re not likely to want to receive a bunch of JPEG screenshots instead.
Just paste the images into a word processor then convert them to a PDF, this at least keeps the PDF instead of JPEGs.
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I’ve been looking for a decent PDF editor on Linux for years. Like you said, there are plenty that will basically work, but I always have issues with font mishandling.
So far I’ve just settled on using a windows VM with adobe for editing PDFs (along with one other windows only program that I need.) There is a way to get Adobe PDF software working in linux, but I haven’t tried it.
If you need to sign PDFs, xournal++ is an excellent app for applying a saved signature as a stamp.
