# Alternative to Acrobat 9 Pro, features needed



## mefizto (Jul 5, 2016)

Greetings all,

after discovering that all the components of Microsoft Office I need, _i.e_., Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, work for all the features I use, I am now motivated to find a replacement for Acrobat 9 Pro, not in the least for the reason that even on Windows it is no longer supported and, as I understand it, rather insecure.

The features that I _absolutely _need are the following:

1.  The ability to change the page layout, _i.e._, insert, extract, replace, and delete pages; split the document;
2.  Minor editing, namely adding text, like the Typewriter feature;
3.  Optical Character Recognition.  I need to OCR about 90-95% of the PDF documents I work with, and I have found the built-in OCR engine to be excellent and very convenient.  However, I would not mind a stand-alone OCR engine;
4.  Ability to fill forms created by third parties.

Would be desirable, but workaround exists:

4.  Merge/assemble PDF document(s), this can be accomplished with 1 above;
5.  Export to a different format, _e.g._, text, PostScript;
6.  Security and accessibility control, _e.g._, signature and authentication, limiting ability to alter the document, and the like.

Any recommendation, including, potentially an OCR engine, would be appreciated.

Kindest regards,

M


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## tobik@ (Jul 5, 2016)

mefizto said:


> 4. Ability to fill forms created by third parties.


graphics/okular can do this. 





mefizto said:


> 5. Export to a different format, _e.g._, text, PostScript;


 graphics/poppler-utils has a bunch of CLI tools (`pdftotext`, `pdftops`) that can do this. 





mefizto said:


> 1. The ability to change the page layout, _i.e._, insert, extract, replace, and delete pages; split the document;
> 2. Minor editing, namely adding text, like the Typewriter feature;


I've had some success with just using LibreOffice Draw (in editors/libreoffice) for this. It can open (and save again) PDF files.


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## aragats (Jul 6, 2016)

mefizto said:


> ...insert, extract, replace, and delete pages; split the document...
> ...Merge/assemble PDF document(s)...


PDF-Shuffler is a simple good tool:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfshuffler/


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## jrm@ (Jul 6, 2016)

mefizto said:


> 1.  The ability to change the page layout, _i.e._, insert, extract, replace, and delete pages; split the document;


You can use gs from print/ghostscript9-agpl-base to do this.  For example, to extract pages use
`# gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=5 -sOutputFile=pp1-5.pdf original.pdf`


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## mefizto (Jul 6, 2016)

Gentlemen,

thank you very much for all the suggestions.

It appears that with the recommended tools, the only missing feature is the minor editing.

Kindest regards,

M


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## aragats (Jul 6, 2016)

Minor editing should work in LibreOffice. Also GIMP may help in many cases, when the searchability is not critical.


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## mefizto (Jul 7, 2016)

Thank you for the recommendation aragats, I will try those two applications.

Kindest regards,

M


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