 Whether you're the type of person who has to deal with PDFs all the time or you're the kind of person who only has to deal with them Once in a while when you're doing taxes or something having a good PDF tool is something that is very important. So I Know personally that I hardly ever do with PDFs It's usually like a once every couple months kind of thing where I have to sign something for a client or I have to do my taxes whatever it has happens to be and Usually during that time period. I'm freaking out because there's not a lot of great PDF tools out there There's quite a few that do a very good job at viewing them There's a quite a few good ones that do a great annotations But outside of that it's kind of hit or miss in terms of what actually is good So what I thought I'd do today is take you through five Really great PDF tools now these all do things differently. They all do different things and Really only one of them is a jack of all trades So just keep that in mind as you go through that it's possible that if you're going to deal with PDFs all the time You may need more than one tool if you decide that you can't do what you need to do with one of these tools So let's go ahead and jump right in The first one on the list for today is called. I love PDF comm and this was recommended to me by one of my patrons Peter This website does some of the basic stuff that you'll probably need to do with a PDF if you happen to just be the occasional PDF editor slash whatever and The reason why I say that is because for the most part if you're dealing with this kind of stuff day in and out you'll probably want a Native tool and I'll talk about some of those tools that do some of this stuff in the rest of the list But if you're just the occasional user of PDFs this tool is really cool It's also useful for people who are on computers that they don't own So if you're on a work computer or whatever and you need to do something with a PDF But you don't have any native tools to do so and say you don't have access to actually install something You could go to this website do some of the stuff you might need to do with a PDF and then move on with your day So this website will allow you to merge and split PDFs It's not the only tool that I'll talk about that does that today But you could do that on this website you can compress it you could convert it to several different formats including word PowerPoint Excel things like that It'll also allow you to add a watermark if you needed to add a watermark You could unlock up a PDF if it's password protected There is the option to sign it as well if you wanted to sign the PDF and you had a digital ID Again, that's not the own This is not the only tool that I will talk about today that will allow you to do that But it is a good one. So just in case you don't have like I said access to a native tool This is a good option. So that is I love PDF comm Okay, so the next one on the list is ocular now ocular is a application that is mostly used for viewing PDFs and I say mostly because it does have a few extra features But for the most part this is what you'll want to use if you just absolutely need to read a PDF So say for example, you've downloaded a book or something and it's in PDF form ocular is a really good choice Now like I said, it does do a few other things so you can annotate to your heart's content in this So there's a highlighter thing here. You can select from underlines You can insert text you can do notes pop-up notes things like that It also has if you set it up the ability to Where is it right here digitally sign a PDF? So if you have to sign a document, you can do that within here you'd have to set up the signature and have a Signature certificate in order to actually do that and then it would be official obviously You can do that from right from here now The reason why I put this at number four is because for whatever reason for me It always appears full screen to begin with so I don't know why it does that You have to get out a full screen in order to actually do anything with it before you and that you know the keyboard shortcuts So I don't know why that does that maybe it's just because I'm in a window manager But this one is always kind of ragged it weirdly for me But it's a great little PDF viewer and it gives you access to the table of contents You can do all the unit like I said your annotations and stuff right here from ocular and it will get you Probably 90% of the way towards what most people actually need now the next one is also a PDF Viewer and the reason why I included two of these is because some of us Preferred to do our work in the terminal some of us prefer to have things that have them key bindings and There just happens to be a program that lets you do both of those things So if you want to view PDFs from your terminal, it's done through a program called Zathara now I'm going to CD into my documents folder here, and I'm going to open up as a thorough so Z A T H U R A and then I have a File here called example PDF dot PDF I'm gonna open that up and it will open up the PDF file that I was basically just in an ocular and you can Basically just do the things that you need to do here, but for the most part this is just for viewing It doesn't have the features of something like ocular. It's just meant for viewing But the cool thing here is that you can use the them key So up and down is J and K if you had the option you could use H and L in order to go side to side You can also search for things using the slash key. So let's just search for non here we know that that's in there somewhere and You can use the small end to go forward big end to go backwards just like you would in them GG goes to the top big G goes to the bottom and If there are links in your PDF, I don't know if there is one in this or not I don't think so when it looks like maybe there isn't a link right there You F and it will highlight the link and you could then hit enter and it would follow that link for you but that just happens to be a Random path link, but the point is is that if there was a link you could use F in order to do that now One thing that I highly recommend you do if you are going to use this thorough is Look at the man page just like you should with any Terminal-based application and it will give you the standard things that you can do so you can view Documents that have password protections. There are plugins for Zerothura. I don't know anything about those I've never tried them. Usually I just use this for just oh, I need to look at this PDF Open up in Zerothura do what I need to do, you know read or whatever and then go away It will all the man page will also give you the standard Keybindings that you'll need to know in order to navigate through a PDF So that is a thorough. It's actually really cool. It's something that I use quite often whenever I just need to view a PDF It's better than ocular for me simply because it doesn't have all the other stuff that I don't necessarily need The next one on the list is called PDF Sam and this does some of the same things as the website I showed you earlier, but it's a native application So what this will basically do is just a few things So it will allow you to merge and split PDFs So say you had two PDFs that you needed to merge together and make one into one PDF You could do that here if you have a very large PDF that you wanted to split into two smaller parts And you didn't want to use the command line to do this You could split a really large PDF into smaller parts that would enable you to send it via email if you wanted to and That way it's not you know too big in order to send via email. You can also Extract pages from the PDF document. So let's just say you needed to send pages four through seven or whatever in PDF to someone else, but you didn't need to send the whole PDF You could extract those pages using this you can also rotate and Split by bookmarks if you have bookmarks embedded into the PDF So if there's not all kind of stuff here that you can do for free There are some premium features that you could do if you needed to use those things But frankly some of the other tools that I've talked about do these things for free and you won't have to pay for them But PDF 7 is really good. It works really well, and it's available on most next distributions in their repos I know it was available in The arch repose so that is PDF Sam the last one on the list is the one that I was talking about at the beginning Where this is kind of the jack of all trades thing and it does everything Really well, and this is LibreOffice draw So this is part of the LibreOffice suite and what this thing does is just basically everything you can edit text So if I wanted to change this word here, I could change this word here to whatever just say I wanted to capitalize the word I could do that if I wanted to move around the parts of this chart I could do that, you know move it up and down if that's what I want to do because these are basically just shapes Whatever I wanted to do it does it you can this also allows you to sign PDFs You can create PDFs here if you needed to create one from scratch If you didn't want to create like a document for something convert it you could just create a PDF just as a PDF There's just a I mean I could sit here for days talking about all the features This is like the Microsoft Office of PDFs It has just a ton of different features and obviously it's free and open source This is the one that I never use honestly to be to be quite honest with you because I never have the need to Actually use this outside of like one time where I had to actually fill out a form So if you have like a form that comes in a PDF and you need to fill that out LibreOffice draw is actually really good because it will allow you to even tab through the form fields and Fill them out and then you can print them or whatever you need to do and just save it as another PDF You can do whatever you need to do that way So this is by far the most versatile of all the tools that I showed you on the list today And that's just simply because it has just a ton of features. So that is LibreOffice draw So those are the top five PDF tools for Linux and honestly out of all of them The one that I find the most useful is a thorough but that's just because for the most part when I deal with PDFs all I have to do is view them and I like the most minimal tool But I know that a lot of people use LibreOffice draw for viewing and editing It's just kind of like a jack of all trades. So if you have a favorite PDF tool or one of these is your favorite PDF tool Let me know in the comment section below. You can follow me on twitter at the linuxcast. I'm also on Mastodon again, it's a fostered on instance. The link for that will be in the video description as well You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast I'd like to thank my current patrons Robert Sid Devon Patrick Fred Kramer Meglyn Jackson I'm from Jules, Steve A. Sebrega Linux, Garrick Samo, KB, TGB, Keith, Andy and uncle bonehead trydevil Mitchell, J-Dog, Carpent Data, Jeremy, Sean, Odin, Marnie, Ross Eduardo, Art Stoner, Elliott, Merrick, Cam, Joshua Lee, Peter Ray, Crucible Dark Finance 6, Primes, and PM Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time