Anyone familiar with Linux is well aware of the most lacking area for applications: Business Applications.
Of the most desired(at least by me) is an equal to Adobe Acrobat. If Adobe would just release a version for Linux they would have an instant base willing to pay for it. But alas, they have not.
There is now no need to look any further. There are a few different solutions out there that do work well enough for Linux. But I have stumbled upon one that works even better than the original!
PDF Studio Pro by Qoppa Software takes just about all the functionality of Adobe Acrobat Pro and makes it much easier to use. But wait, it get’s even better! It is also cross platform compatible – it works in Windows, Linux and Mac. And as if that was not enough, it is much less expensive than the Adobe software!
If you need to be able to digitally sign documents you will want the pro version. At $95 for single copies (~$54 for large quantity purchases) you cannot beat it. Once you download the free trial, you will see how much easier it is to use. It is much more intuitive than any other pdf software I have used.
There are a couple of features that this software does not include when compared to Adobe’s offering. These are OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and the ability to create forms. The former I have only used on rare occasions in Acrobat. And the latter can be accomplished much more easily with LibreOffice, OpenOffice or Scribus.
If you were holding off using Linux as your primary business operating system because of a few missing applications; you can scratch the killer pdf application off your list. Sit down and try this application. You will find in short order that it is much easier to use than any other. The ability to use it in just about any operating system makes it a major deal sealer for me.
Larry's Linux Lair 
Nice post and will be looking forward to future articles on Linux and other software on this blog.
The most flagrant missing feature of “PDF Studio” is that it does *NOT* provide an “Undo” function! This is surprising for a non-free software… From my point of view, this is a really serious limitation.
The undo feature is now available in version 8.
In case you missed my earlier post, this feature is now in version 8.
Another missing feature of PDF Studio is its lack of ability to import html files into the mix. This is a baisic feature even in free pdf software. in fact, there are free versions that do as much or more than PDF Studio. Too bad, we desperately need a Linux software that can match ALL of Acrobat’s functions.
Please let me know of the free software that does as much or more than PDFStudio Pro, because I thought I had tried them all and none come close to this.
I was really happy to find a PDF editor running on my Linux (Ubuntu).
But it seems that it doesn’t work fine, or is it a setup problem ? I have tried to edit PDF created with QuarkXpress :
– it takes at least 2 minutes to open (1 page file)
– impossible to edit any content …
Any suggestion would be appreciated.
There is a setting that needs to be updated on Version 7 having to do with memory.
http://kbpdfstudio.qoppa.com/general/memory
And how about editing form field names & in checkboxes & radios? Not worth to buy for now…sorry.
Adobe Acrobat itself stinks at this. Sure it is able to do it but not easily.
I create all of my forms and original content with LibreOffice and Scribus. I find it much easier to layout and create original content with these than Acrobat.
My office setup includes networked Mac OS X, Linux (Linux Mint 13 and 14 and Ubuntu 12.04) and Windows 7 machines. I thought that PDF Studio would be an excellent alternative to Adobe Acrobat Pro for Mac and Windows plus a replacement for the various free PDF tools available for linux. Unfortunately, although I could get all the free linux tools to work with my Epson V600 Photo scanner, the scan to PDF function in PDF Studio did not work. In addition, the licensing for PDF Studio restricts installation to only 2 computers. Nevertheless, I think if PDF Studio can address the scan to PDF issue in linux, introduce more liberal licensing (such as per user rather than per computer), and bring their price down, I would definitely take another look at what appears to be a very promising product.
I was very disappointed in PDF Studio Pro. I tried to look at a pdf file which had
been marked up/commented by a colleagure. Any lines where he had placed
a comment were blurred out and completely illegible. As far as I am concerned
this makes the software useless. And I had such high hopes after reading the
initial posting
I can edit most of PDF files with Inkscape …and I mean edit for print ..shape editing is important for me
Wow that was unusual. I just wrote an incredibly long comment
but after I clicked submit my comment didn’t appear. Grrrr… well I’m not writing all that over again.
Anyhow, just wanted to say great blog!
Thank you for the kind words.
I have had the same thing happen to me a couple of times. I have learned to ALWAYS select the entire coomment I am making and copying it to the clipboard BEFORE I submit any online comments. That way it is a simple matter to just paste it back and re-submit if there are any issues.
Looking forward to version 9 and the ability to work with existing forms and digital signature fields. I installed the free Pro trial on my Win 7 Ultimate machine, but can’t work with the forms. “Highlight Form Fields” only highlights the digital signature fields, but I can’t digitally sign them using the tool provided. Nothing happens when clicking the fields. Interestingly, exporting the form to XML shows that all of the form fields are being recognized … just can’t do anything with them, or see them in the normal display. Any idea when version 9 with all of the form stuff is coming out? Thanks for this app.
(From Developer) Your form may be secured and permissions do not allow form filling. Look under File -> Document Properties -> Security tab. Contact support from Help -> Email Support with any question.
I downloaded the trial version to see if it could reduce the file size of a PDF document. From the following link, it looks like this feature won’t be available until version 9: http://www.qoppa.com/files/pdfstudio/buy/compare_acrobat.html
According to the link, version 9 is supposed to be released fall, 2013. Any insight on a more specific release date? Do you know of any Linux pdf software available now that can reduce the file size?
No exactly sure of when V9 will be out.
Quoppa sometimes runs past their estimated release dates but does so by ensuring the features work like intended.
As for compressing pdf files in Linux, I like the command line best, try this:
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdfOf course you have to have ghostscript installed first.
I don’t know if Qoppa changed their minds about including the feature, but the chart you link shows that version 9 does not include file size reduction. 😦 I’ve been using the command line solution Larry gave and it works pretty well. I put it in a little script to make it easier for me to use:
#!/bin/bash
# ask for input file; don't need to escape spaces
echo -n "File to compress (no extension): "
read filename
# rename input file to backup
mv -i -v "$filename.pdf" "$filename big.pdf"
# compress the file
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sOutputFile="$filename.pdf" "$filename big.pdf"
I have it make a backup file out of nervousness because I’ve hardly written any scripts; you could remove that bit if you feel bolder.
If you have trash-cli installed you can add
# move backup to trash
trash-put "$filename big.pdf"
Two differences in the actual script I use: 1. The PDFs I use this with are always in the same folder, so I have the script automatically navigate to that folder first. Then I can just click on the script (which I keep in the same folder) and enter the filename. 2. I use -dCompatibilityLevel=1.5 for possibly greater compression.
Thank you for sending the link over. I did try to install this, but received errors. My company is ready to purchase and then implement this as a standard platform, but the error is too persistent. Do you have any suggestions, or do you know if this is being worked on?
Really this application is very usefull and interesting to use. helps a lot..
Really PDF Studio suits for all kinds of PDF related work and sometimes I found it better than other PDF softwares. Will recommend it for sure to all users to atleat give it a try. Also very fast when combining multiple images into one pfd file. Easy to edit and all…
This looks like a great product, but for some reason will not install on CentOS. Tried to use the alien tool to convert, but with no success. Is there a yum install or .rpm repository for PDF Studio Pro? Any assistance would be appreciated.
To Doug: Here is a link to our rpm installer:
http://www.qoppa.com/pdfstudio/demo/PDFStudio_install_linux.rpm