Aren't we supposed to be living in a paperless world by now?

I can't be the only person who imagined the office of the future, free from the confines
of the eight and a half by eleven sheet (or A4, for my international friends), would have
long since arrived. Instead, we've managed to land in an intermediate state of not
paperless, but less paper.

It could be worse.

Between a trusty scanner, email and various other communication tools, and getting
really good at organizing my digital archives, I'm not totally unhappy with where we are
today. And I do occasionally admit to reading a paper book, sending a postcard, or
(gasp) printing something off to give to someone else.

Until the world moves a little further from paper, print-ready file formats will continue to
permeate our digital landscape as well. And, love it or hate it, PDF, the "portable
document format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format)," seems
to be the go-to format for creating and sharing print-ready files, as well as archiving
files that originated as print.

For years, the only name in the game for working with PDF documents was Adobe
Acrobat, whether in the form of their free reader edition or one of their paid editions for
PDF creation and editing. But today, there are numerous open source PDF applications
which have chipped away at this market dominance. And for Linux users like me, a
proprietary application that only runs on Windows or Mac isn't an option anyway.

Since PDF files are used in so many different situations for so many different kinds of
purposes, you may need to shop around to find the open source alternative to Adobe
Acrobat that meets your exact needs. Here are some tools I enjoy.

Reading PDFs

For reading PDFs, these days many people get by without having to use an external
application at all. Both Firefox (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/) and
Chromium (https://www.chromium.org/Home), the open source version of Google's
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 For downloaded files, users of GNOME-based Linux distributions have Evince
(https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince) (or Atril on the GNOME 2 fork, MATE
(https://opensource.com/article/19/12/mate-linux-desktop)), a powerful PDF reader
that handles most documents quickly and with ease. Evince has a Windows port as
well, although Windows users may also want to check out the GPLv3-licensed
SumatraPDF (https://github.com/sumatrapdfreader/sumatrapdf) as an alternative.
KDE's Okular (https://okular.kde.org/) serves as the PDF reader for the Plasma
Desktop. All of these have the ability to complete PDF forms, view and make
comments, search for text, select text, and so on.

For a generic, simple, and fast PDF reader, try xpdf

(https://www.xpdfreader.com/download.html).

Creating PDFs

Personally, LibreOffice (https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/)'s

export functionality ends up being the source of 95% of the PDFs I create that weren't
built for me by a web application. Scribus (https://www.scribus.net/), Inkscape
(https://inkscape.org/en/), and GIMP (https://www.gimp.org/) all support native PDF
export, too, so no matter what kind of document you need to make -- a complex layout,
formatted text, vector or raster image, or some combination -- there's an open source
application that meets your needs.

For practically every other application, the CUPS (https://www.cups.org/) printing

system does an excellent job of outputting documents as PDF, because printers and
PDFs both rely on PostScript to represent data on page (whether the page is digital or
physical).

If you don't need fancy graphical interfaces, you can also generate PDFs through plain
text with a few handy terminal commands. Everyone has their favourite, but probably
the most popular is Pandoc (https://opensource.com/downloads/pandoc-cheat-
sheet), which takes nearly any format of document and translates it to nearly any other
format. Its ability to translate text formats is staggering, so it's probably all you really
need. However, there are several other solutions, including Docbook
(https://opensource.com/article/17/9/docbook), Sphinx
We (https://opensource.com/article/18/11/building-custom-workflows-sphinx),
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(https://opensource.com/article/17/6/introduction-latex).
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 Editing PDFs

Editing is a loaded term. For some people, editing a PDF means changing a few words
or a swapping out an old image for a new one, while for others it means altering
metadata such as bookmarks, and for still others it means manipulating page order or
adjusting print resolution. The authoritative answer nobody ever wants is: don't edit
PDFs, edit the source and then export a new PDF. That's not always possible, though,
and luckily there are some great tools to make all manner of edits possible.

LibreOffice Draw (https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/draw/) does a fantastic job of

editing PDF files, giving you full access to the text and images. There are caveats to
this, because of the flexibility of the PDF format. If you haven't installed the fonts used
in the PDF, then the flow of text could change due to font substitution,. If the PDF was
created from a scan, then you'll only have images of text and not editable text.

Inkscape (https://inkscape.org/en/), too, does a good job with opening documents

created elsewhere, and may be a more intuitive choice if your document is heavy on
graphics. If you don't have a font installed, Inkscape (through the Poppler
(https://poppler.freedesktop.org/) renderer) can trace characters so that the
appearance of text is maintained even without the actual font data. Of course, that
loses the text data (you have only the shapes of letters, not the selectable text itself)
but it's a nice feature when appearance matters most.

There are standalone tools as well, like the GPLv2 licensed PDFedit
(http://pdfedit.cz/en/index.html), but I've had such good luck with Inkscape and
LibreOffice that I haven't had to use a separate editor in recent years.

If your editing tasks are less about the content and more about presentation, you
might find the pdftk-java (https://gitlab.com/pdftk-java) (PDF ToolKit) command
useful. It can extract and inject bookmark metadata, rearrange and concatenate pages,
combine many PDFs into one, break a PDF apart, and much more. If you're not
comfortable in a terminal yet, PDFSam (https://pdfsam.org/) has many similar
functions, but includes a graphical interface.

Finally, you can adjust PostScript properties directly with the GhostScript
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