Background

If you’ve ever needed to edit a PDF document containing one or more pages you’ve probably found it to be rather daunting unless you have some expensive software. I have found two solutions for editing PDFs with open source software; the first (flpsed) allows quick and easy simple edit functionality, while the second (GIMP) allows you to do most anything with a PDF.

Details

Simple Editing with flpsed

I have recently found the flpsed app which works well for entering plain text and tags within a PDF document. flpsed is rather basic, it does not allow adding images (for example: an image of your signature), but it is very convenient for filling out a PDF document with simple text input.

To Install

$ sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends flpsed

To Use

$ flpsed myDocument.pdf

Editing with GIMP and pdftk

GIMP supports importing PDF documents. Once imported, you can do anything with the PDF that you can do to a traditional image in GIMP.

To Install

$ sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends gimp pdftk

note: if your version of gimp does not support exporting as .pdf you can use the convert application which is contained in the imagemagick package

To Use

• Open the PDF document you wish to edit in GIMP 
  note: if your PDF contains multiple pages, GIMP will notify you and allow you to open each page as layer or an image. I use a image as I want each page as its own image (I “glue” them back together in a later step).
• Alter the PDF page(s) as needed and Export To… a “.pdf”
  note: previous versions of GIMP did not allow Exporting to .pdf format, if this is your case, save it as a png and use convert (located in the imagemagick package) to convert from a .png to .pdf (e.g. $ convert myDocument.png myDocument.pdf)
• Use pdftk to concat (“glue”) the separated pdfs back into one PDF document

pdftk myDocument_p1.pdf myDocument_p2.pdf myDocument_p3.pdf cat output myDocument-combined.pdf

where myDocument_p1.pdf, myDocument_p2.pdf, myDocument_p3.pdf are the individual pdf files and myDocument-combined.pdf is the single pdf document that contains all of the individual pdf files. note: you can shorten/simplify the above using brace expansion (in bash) to be as follows:

simplified with brace expansion:

$ pdftk mydocument_p{1,2,3}.pdf cat output myDocument-combined.pdf

Flpsed allows quick and easy editing while GIMP/pdftk provide a robust suite for nearly all PDF editing needs. Both approaches provide an alternative to printing documents, signing them, and faxing/emailing back.

If you know of a better approach please share!