curiously poppler doesn't mention that anywhere on their website, but the library comes with a similar suite of tools, typically available in linux distributions.
I had to bash my head against the wall and submit myself to paying for a creative cloud license. At least acrobat just works. Although I wish there was a reasonable alternative.
CEOs often need to sign changes to employment terms or options/vesting terms and have hundreds if not thousands of employees. They don't have the time to go through and sign all of those contracts.
Its no different than the analog ages where a secretary would go through and stamp all the contracts with the CEOs signature.
Why wouldn’t a company sign documents they create automatically? This is about a cryptographic signature that lets the user verify authorship, not a visual signature in the PDF, right? So it would still be useful to be able to verify that a bank statement is really from my bank, even if it was generated without human interaction.
Not the same thing but just want to shoutout https://www.pdfgear.com/ as one of the only viable alternatives to adobe for intermediate level PDF tinkering. It’s free and available for everything except Linux.
This is totally an aside, but I wonder how long the "Swiss army knife" metaphor will hang on in popular culture. People generally use it to indicate that something does a variety of things, but I'd say many of younger generation have never touched if even seen such a knife in their life, and even among older generations it doesn't have a positive connotation.
Like when I hear something is the Swiss army knife of something, my take is that it does a lot of things poorly and there are better specific tools for every need. Like if you need a really terrible knife or bottle opener or screwdriver or saw, a Swiss Army knife has you covered. But it should be a tool of last resort when you have no other options.
Swiss Army knives seem to be as popular as ever. What do you mean, doesn't have a positive connotation?
They're great hiking, camping, traveling, in backpacks and bags.
What's wrong with it as a knife? It's perfectly sharp. Obviously it's not a full-sized chef's knife, but it will cut your apple or twine or packing tape. It's a multitool. It does lots of things. A tool of "last resort" seems to miss the point -- it's not meant to use at home, when you have a full-size screwdriver and bottle opener and corkscrew. It's for traveling with you. And it's great at that.
SAK's are iconic. I don't think your take is a common one.
It’s not open-source, so practically the question is equivalent to “why reinvent the wheel by creating libreoffice when there’s a perfectly good Microsoft office suite out there”
This was my first thought, but after reading the comments here, I see I had no idea how many other alternatives already existed, so why not add another one.
curiously poppler doesn't mention that anywhere on their website, but the library comes with a similar suite of tools, typically available in linux distributions.
i have found them very helpful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppler_(software)#poppler-uti...
I use these all the time. They are great.
There is also: https://pdfcpu.io/
That said, if you're looking for a GUI app to do simple PDF mutations it's often hard to fine a simple solid open source cross platform app.
At least I haven't found one :)
If self hosting is an option, I've found Signature PDF to be quite good.
https://github.com/24eme/signaturepdf?tab=readme-ov-file#sig...
I had to bash my head against the wall and submit myself to paying for a creative cloud license. At least acrobat just works. Although I wish there was a reasonable alternative.
How about this: https://tools.pdf24.org/en
It allows installation for offline use too.
For low-level work, qpdf can be quite useful: https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf
Came here to say this. Qpdf is my go-to for manipulating pdf files on the command line. Encrypting, decrypting, extracting and merging pages.
It's Apache-licensed and written in C++.
I’m curious: what good would automating signing a PDF through a utility do?
The whole purpose of a signature is that a person signed and agreed to something. That cannot be done automatically.
CEOs often need to sign changes to employment terms or options/vesting terms and have hundreds if not thousands of employees. They don't have the time to go through and sign all of those contracts.
Its no different than the analog ages where a secretary would go through and stamp all the contracts with the CEOs signature.
Those don’t need certified signatures. They just need pdf stamps.
It depends on jurisdiction
Pdf stamps have zero security.
Signing can be cryptographic.
Why wouldn’t a company sign documents they create automatically? This is about a cryptographic signature that lets the user verify authorship, not a visual signature in the PDF, right? So it would still be useful to be able to verify that a bank statement is really from my bank, even if it was generated without human interaction.
Also allowing you to detect whether any changes have been made since the signature was applied.
Not the same thing but just want to shoutout https://www.pdfgear.com/ as one of the only viable alternatives to adobe for intermediate level PDF tinkering. It’s free and available for everything except Linux.
I found it suspicious, they formerly sent stuff too their cloud without it being obvious, and the company seems to mod their own subreddit.
In addition to the already mentioned, there is also pdfcpu[0], "a Go PDF processor and CLI"
[0]: https://github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu
I though Swiss Army knife for PDF are Didier Stevens PDF tools:
https://blog.didierstevens.com/programs/pdf-tools/
This is totally an aside, but I wonder how long the "Swiss army knife" metaphor will hang on in popular culture. People generally use it to indicate that something does a variety of things, but I'd say many of younger generation have never touched if even seen such a knife in their life, and even among older generations it doesn't have a positive connotation.
Like when I hear something is the Swiss army knife of something, my take is that it does a lot of things poorly and there are better specific tools for every need. Like if you need a really terrible knife or bottle opener or screwdriver or saw, a Swiss Army knife has you covered. But it should be a tool of last resort when you have no other options.
And thus the Leatherman(tm) was born from its ashes.
And too quickly smothered in copycats for its name to become the new metaphor.
9/11 killed them. They used to be sold in airports.
Swiss Army knives seem to be as popular as ever. What do you mean, doesn't have a positive connotation?
They're great hiking, camping, traveling, in backpacks and bags.
What's wrong with it as a knife? It's perfectly sharp. Obviously it's not a full-sized chef's knife, but it will cut your apple or twine or packing tape. It's a multitool. It does lots of things. A tool of "last resort" seems to miss the point -- it's not meant to use at home, when you have a full-size screwdriver and bottle opener and corkscrew. It's for traveling with you. And it's great at that.
SAK's are iconic. I don't think your take is a common one.
Be serious. If someone in 2025 has a pocket multitool, there's about a 1% chance it is red with a white cross on it.
What about https://www.ghostscript.com ?
Pdftk has been been around for many years, and does exactly the same things. Why reinvent the wheel?
https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/
It’s not open-source, so practically the question is equivalent to “why reinvent the wheel by creating libreoffice when there’s a perfectly good Microsoft office suite out there”
It makes sense to me. They made a PDF library for Python first. Having a PDF library for your preferred language is a good thing.
And it’s natural to then build a cli tool on top of the library they already made.
This was my first thought, but after reading the comments here, I see I had no idea how many other alternatives already existed, so why not add another one.
https://github.com/LibrePDF/OpenPDF
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