PDF desktop applications

Discover great graphical PDF tools for merging, splitting, OCR, and more.

Table of Contents

• PDF Chain
• OCRFeeder
• PDF Mix Tool
• LibreOffice Draw
• Paperwork
• PDF Arranger
• PDFMtEd
• PDF Tricks
• Rescribe
• PDF Viewers

PDF Chain

A graphical frontend for PDFtk. It allows to split, merge, print a stamp, attach files and more with a simple interface. Because its a frontend, you must have PDFtk installed on your system. Available on Flatpak, AUR and Ubuntu (PPA).

OCRFeeder

This GNOME app is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) system. You can import images or PDFs and OCRFeeder will detect text using an OCR engine like Tesseract. You can export the result in several formats, including ODT and searchable PDF. Maybe a bit tricky to use.

Tip: you can specify new zones where text or images are located (dragging with the mouse) or resize existing ones, select a different language (Misc -> Language) and then press OCR to do a new OCR scan.

PDF Mix Tool

Similar to PDF Chain, allows to split, merge, rotate and other simple PDF tasks. It’s a small and easy to use application.

LibreOffice Draw

This PDF editor is part of LibreOffice suite and it has a lot of options to create and edit PDFs (add text, shapes, fields, change page properties, etc).

Paperwork

A simple OCR tool. In my tests, results were not as good as with ocrmypdf.

PDF Arranger

It allows to split, merge or rearrange PDF pages.

PDFMtEd

View and edit PDF metadata graphically (it’s an ExifTool frontend). Programs (Editor and Inspector) are only visible when you do right-click on a PDF file and put the cursor over “Open with…”. Design looks a bit weird on my system.

PDF Tricks

With this app you can compress, merge, split PDFs and convert them to JPEG, PNG and TXT formats.

Rescribe

Another OCR tool. Download the binary, make it executable and run it. It uses tesseract on the backend. You may need to select your OCR language data by clicking on Language/Script -> Other and select the trained data file (usually inside /usr/share/tessdata/).

Rescribe will create a folder in the same directory as the PDF file with a text file, a searchable PDF and other info.

PDF Viewers

Check my post: PDF viewers.

If you have any suggestion, feel free to contact me via social media or email.