PDF, PS and DjVu - ArchWiki

Jump to content

This article covers software to view, edit and convert PDF, PostScript (PS), DjVu (déjà vu) and XPS files.

## Engines

- Poppler — PDF rendering library based on Xpdf. For CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) support with Poppler, install poppler-data.

  https://poppler.freedesktop.org/ || poppler

- Mupdf — MuPDF is a lightweight PDF, XPS, and EPUB viewer, consisting of a software library, command line tools, and viewers.

  https://mupdf.com/ || libmupdf

- libspectre — Small library for rendering Postscript documents.

  https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/libspectre || libspectre

- Ghostscript — Interpreter for PostScript and PDF. Provides the gs(1) command-line interface, see also `/usr/share/doc/ghostscript/*/Use.htm` (online[dead link 2022-09-22 ⓘ]), along with many wrapper scripts like ps2pdf and pdf2ps.

  https://ghostscript.com/ || ghostscript

- DjVuLibre — Suite to create, manipulate and view DjVu documents.

  https://djvu.sourceforge.net/ || djvulibre

- libgxps — GObject based library for handling and rendering XPS documents.

  https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/libgxps || libgxps

## Viewers

### Framebuffer

- fbgs — Poor man's PostScript/pdf viewer for the linux framebuffer console.

  https://www.kraxel.org/blog/linux/fbida/ || fbida

- fbpdf — Small framebuffer PDF and DjVu viewer based on MuPDF, with Vim keybindings and written in C

  https://repo.or.cz/w/fbpdf.git || fbpdf-gitAUR

- jfbview — Framebuffer PDF and image viewer. Features include Vim-like controls, zoom-to-fit, a TOC (outline) view and fast multi-threaded rendering.

  https://github.com/jichu4n/jfbview || jfbviewAUR

### Graphical

Note: Some web browsers can display PDF files, for example with PDF.js.

- Adobe Reader — Proprietary PDF file viewer offered by Adobe. Discontinued for Linux.

  https://www.adobe.com/products/reader.html || acroreadAUR

- apvlv — Lightweight document viewer with Vim keybindings using GTK libraries. Supports PDF, DjVu, EPUB, HTML and TXT.

  https://naihe2010.github.io/apvlv/ || apvlvAUR

- Atril — Simple multi-page document viewer for MATE. Supports DjVu, DVI, EPS, EPUB, PDF, PostScript, TIFF, XPS and Comicbook.

  https://github.com/mate-desktop/atril || atril

- CorePDF — Simple lightweight PDF viewer based on Qt and poppler. Part of C-Suite.

  https://cubocore.org/ || corepdfAUR

- Deepin Document Viewer — A simple PDF and DjVu reader, supporting bookmarks, highlights and annotations.

  https://github.com/linuxdeepin/deepin-reader || deepin-reader

- DjView — Viewer for DjVu documents.

  https://djvu.sourceforge.net/djview4.html || djview

- ePDFView — Lightweight PDF document viewer using the Poppler and GTK libraries. Development stopped.

  http://freecode.com/projects/epdfview || epdfview

- Emacs — See also pdf-tools for improved pdf support (emacs-pdf-tools-gitAUR) and the djvu package for djvu support.

  https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ || emacs

- Evince — Document viewer for GNOME using GTK. Supports DjVu, DVI, EPS, PDF, PostScript, TIFF, XPS and Comicbook.

  https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince || evince

- Foxit Reader — Small, fast (compared to Acrobat) proprietary PDF viewer. Releases (outside of security updates) are discontinued for Linux (November 2020).

  https://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf-reader/ || foxitreaderAUR

- gv — Graphical user interface for the Ghostscript interpreter that allows to view and navigate through PostScript and PDF documents.

  https://www.gnu.org/software/gv/ || gv

- llpp — Very fast PDF reader based off of MuPDF, that supports continuous page scrolling, bookmarking, and text search through the whole document.

  https://repo.or.cz/w/llpp.git || llppAUR

- MuPDF — Very fast EPUB, FictionBook, PDF, XPS and Comicbook viewer written in portable C. Features CJK font support and vim-like bindings.

  https://mupdf.com/ || mupdf

- Okular — Universal document viewer for KDE. Supports CHM, Comicbook, DjVu, DVI, EPUB, FictionBook, Mobipocket, ODT, PDF, Plucker, PostScript, TIFF and XPS.

  https://okular.kde.org/ || okular

- pdfpc — Presenter console with multi-monitor support for PDF files.

  https://pdfpc.github.io/ || pdfpc

- qpdfview — Tabbed document viewer. It uses Poppler for PDF support, libspectre for PS support, DjVuLibre for DjVu support, CUPS for printing support and the Qt toolkit for its interface.

  https://launchpad.net/qpdfview || qpdfviewAUR

- Sioyek — Lightweight PDF viewer based on MuPDF with features designed for viewing research papers and technical books.

  https://sioyek.info/ || sioyekAUR

- Xpdf — Viewer that can decode LZW and read encrypted PDFs.

  https://www.xpdfreader.com/ || xpdf

- Xreader — Document viewer part of the X-Apps Project. Supports DjVu, DVI, EPUB, PDF, PostScript, TIFF, XPS, Comicbook.

  https://github.com/linuxmint/xreader/ || xreader

- Zathura — Highly customizable and functional document viewer (plugin based). Supports PDF, DjVu, PostScript and Comicbook.

  https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/ || zathura

#### Comparison

The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.

Reason: Filling out PDF forms seem to be broken in MuPDF and llpp. (Discuss in Talk:PDF, PS and DjVu)

Name | PDF | PostScript | DjVu | XPS | PDF forms | PDF Annotation | Non-rectangle selection | License
--- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | ---
Adobe Reader | Custom | – | – | – | Yes | – | Yes | proprietary
apvlv | Poppler | – | DjVuLibre | – | No | – | No (not by default, at least) | GPLv2
Atril | Poppler | libspectre | DjVuLibre | libgxps | Yes | – | – | GPLv2
DjView | – | – | DjVuLibre | – | – | – | – | GPLv2
Emacs | Ghostscript* | DjVuLibre* | – | No | Yes | Yes | GPLv3
Emacs pdf-tools | Poppler | – | – | – | – | Yes | Yes | GPLv3
ePDFView | Poppler | – | – | – | No | – | – | GPLv2
Evince | Poppler | libspectre | DjVuLibre | libgxps | Yes | Yes | Yes | GPLv2
Foxit Reader | Custom | – | – | – | Yes | Yes | Yes | proprietary
gv | Ghostscript | – | – | No | – | – | GPLv3
llpp | libmupdf | – | – | libmupdf | Yes | – | – | GPLv3
MuPDF | Custom | – | – | Custom | Yes (mupdf-gl) | Yes (mupdf-gl) | Yes (mupdf-gl) | AGPLv3
Okular | Poppler | libspectre | DjVuLibre | Custom | Yes | Yes | Yes | GPL, LGPL
pdfpc | Poppler | – | – | – | No | – | – | GPLv2
qpdfview | Poppler | libspectre* | DjVuLibre* | – | Yes | Yes | – | GPLv2
Xpdf | Custom | – | – | – | No | – | – | GPLv3
Xreader | Poppler | libspectre* | DjVuLibre* | libgxps* | Yes | Yes | Yes | GPLv2
Zathura | Poppler* / libmupdf* | libspectre* | DjVuLibre* | libmupdf* | No | No | No | zlib

* Optional dependency needs to be installed

#### PDF forms

The PDF forms column in the above table refers to AcroForms support. If you do not need your input to be directly extractable from the PDF, you can also use the applications in #Annotation or #Graphical PDF editing to put text on top of a PDF. PDF forms can be created with LibreOffice Writer (View > Toolbars > Form Controls) and the advanced PDF editors.

The proprietary and deprecated XFA format for forms is not fully supported by Poppler[1][2] and only supported by Adobe Reader and Master PDF Editor.

Alternatively, web browsers such as Firefox or Chromium feature a built-in PDF viewer capable of filling out forms.

## Annotation

- flpsed — A PostScript and PDF annotator, only supports text boxes.

  https://flpsed.org/flpsed.html || flpsedAUR

See also List of applications/Documents#Stylus note-taking.

## Graphical PDF editing

- Scribus can import and export PDF; text is imported as polygons.[3]
- LibreOffice Draw can import and export PDF; text is imported as text; embedded fonts are substituted.[4][5]
- Inkscape can import a single page from a PDF and export to PDF; text is imported as cloned glyphs or text; with the latter embedded fonts are substituted.
- Graphics editors like GIMP and krita can also import and export PDFs at the cost of rasterization.

### Basic editors

- jPDF Tweak — Java Swing application that can combine, split, rotate, reorder, watermark, encrypt, sign, and otherwise tweak PDF files.

  https://jpdftweak.sourceforge.net/ || jpdftweakAUR

- PDF Arranger — Helps merge or split pdf documents and rotate, crop and rearrange pages. It is a maintained fork of PDF-Shuffler.

  https://github.com/jeromerobert/pdfarranger || pdfarranger

- PDF Chain — GTK front-end for PDFtk, written in C++, supporting concatenation, burst, watermarks, attaching files and more.

  http://pdfchain.sourceforge.net/ || pdfchainAUR

- PdfJumbler — Simple tool to rearrange, merge, delete and rotate pages in PDF files.

  https://github.com/mgropp/pdfjumbler || pdfjumblerAUR

- PDF Mix Tool — Qt front-end for PoDoFo, written in C++, supports splitting, merging, rotating and mixing PDF files.

  https://scarpetta.eu/pdfmixtool/ || pdfmixtool

- PDF Mod — Reorder, rotate, and remove pages, export images from a document, edit the title, subject, author, and keywords, and combine documents via drag and drop.

  https://wiki.gnome.org/Attic/PdfMod || pdfmod

- PDFsam — Open source application, written in Java, supports merging, splitting and rotating.

  https://pdfsam.org/ || pdfsamAUR

- PDF Slicer — Simple application to extract, merge, rotate and reorder pages of PDF documents.

  https://junrrein.github.io/pdfslicer/ || pdfslicer

- PDF Tricks — Simple, efficient application for small manipulations in PDF files using Ghostscript.

  https://github.com/muriloventuroso/pdftricks || pdftricks

### Cropping tools

- briss — Java GUI to crop pages of PDF documents to one or more regions selected.

  https://sourceforge.net/projects/briss/ || brissAUR

- krop — Simple graphical tool to crop the pages of PDF files.

  https://arminstraub.com/software/krop || kropAUR

- pdfCropMargins — Automatically crops the margins of PDF files.

  https://github.com/abarker/pdfCropMargins || pdfcropmarginsAUR

- PdfHandoutCrop — Tool to crop pdf handout with multiple pages per sheet.

  https://cges30901.github.io/pdfhandoutcrop/ || pdfhandoutcropAUR

### Advanced editors

- Master PDF Editor — Functional proprietary PDF editor. Latest version free for non-commercial use. The -free package is outdated but lacks a watermark.

  https://code-industry.net/free-pdf-editor/ || masterpdfeditorAUR, masterpdfeditor-freeAUR

- PDF Studio — All-in-one proprietary PDF editor similar to Adobe Acrobat.

  https://www.qoppa.com/pdfstudio/ || pdfstudio-binAUR

## PDF tools

See also Ghostscript.

- Coherent PDF — Command line tools to manipulate PDF files including merge, encrypt, decrypt, scale, crop, rotate, bookmarks, stamp, logos, page numbers.

  https://community.coherentpdf.com/ || cpdfAUR

- DiffPDF — Compare the text or the visual appearance of each page in two PDF files.

  https://gitlab.com/eang/diffpdf || diffpdf

- mupdf-tools — Tools developed as part of MuPDF, contains mutool(1) and muraster.

  https://mupdf.com || mupdf-tools

- pdfcpu — Command-line tool to create and modify PDFs.

  https://github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu || pdfcpu-gitAUR

- pdfgrep — Commandline utility to search text in PDF files.

  https://pdfgrep.org/ || pdfgrep

- pdfjam — Can be used to n-up, join, rotate and flip PDFs and arrange them into a format suitable for book binding.

  https://github.com/DavidFirth/pdfjam || texlive-core

- pdf2svg — Convert PDF files to SVG files.

  http://www.cityinthesky.co.uk/opensource/pdf2svg/ || pdf2svg

- PDFtk — Simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents.

  https://gitlab.com/pdftk-java/pdftk || pdftk

- QPDF — Content-preserving PDF transformation system.

  https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf || qpdf

- Stapler — Light alternative to PDFtk using the PyPDF2 library.

  https://github.com/hellerbarde/stapler || staplerAUR, stapler-gitAUR

### Create a PDF from images

With GraphicsMagick:

    $ gm convert 1.jpg 2.jpg 3.jpg out.pdf

### Concatenate PDFs

With Ghostscript:

    $ gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=out.pdf -dBATCH 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf

With PDFtk:

    $ pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf cat output out.pdf

With Poppler:

    $ pdfunite 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf out.pdf

With QPDF:

    $ qpdf --empty --pages 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf -- out.pdf

### Convert a PDF to text

With Poppler and maintaining the layout:

    $ pdftotext -layout in.pdf out.txt

See also pdftotext(1).

### Decrypt a PDF

This section lists commands to decrypt a PDF to an unencrypted file. Note that most PDF viewers also support encrypted PDFs.

With PDFtk:

    $ pdftk in.pdf input_pw password output out.pdf

With Poppler to PostScript:

    $ pdftops -upw password in.pdf out.ps

With QPDF:

    $ qpdf --decrypt --password=password in.pdf out.pdf

Tip: Forgotten passwords might be recovered with pdfcrack, see pdfcrack(1).

### Encrypt a PDF

The user password is used for encryption, the owner password to restrict operations once the document is decrypted, for more information, see Wikipedia:PDF#Security and signatures.

With PDFtk:

    $ pdftk in.pdf output out.pdf user_pw password

With PoDoFo:

    $ podofoencrypt -u user_password -o owner_password in.pdf out.pdf

With QPDF:

    $ qpdf --encrypt user_password owner_password key_length -- in.pdf out.pdf

where `key_length` can be 40, 128 or 256.

### Extract images from a PDF

With Poppler to JPEG:

    $ pdfimages infile.pdf -j outfileroot

### Extract page range from PDF, split multipage PDF document

With Ghostscript as a single file[6]

    $ gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -dFirstPage=first -dLastPage=last -sOutputFile=outfile.pdf infile.pdf

With PDFtk as a single file:

    $ pdftk infile.pdf cat first-last output outfile.pdf

With Poppler as separate files:

    $ pdfseparate -f first -l last infile.pdf outfileroot-%d.pdf

With QPDF as a single file:

    $ qpdf --empty --pages infile.pdf first-last -- outfile.pdf

With mutool as a single file:

    $ mutool clean -g infile.pdf outfile.pdf first-last

### Imposing a PDF

PDF Imposition (e.g. to combine multiple pages to one page) can be done with pdfjam, for example paper waste can be reduced with pdfnup and pdfbook can be used to arrange PDFs into a format suitable for book binding.

### Inspecting metadata

With ExifTool:

    $ exiftool file.pdf

With Poppler:

    $ pdfinfo file.pdf

### Optimize, reduce size of a PDF

With Ghostscript one of:

    $ ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen in.pdf out.pdf
    $ gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -sOutputFile=out.pdf in.pdf

For different settings see the documentation[dead link 2022-09-22 ⓘ].

There is also shrinkpdfAUR, a script wrapping gs.

### Rasterize a PDF

With GraphicsMagick to convert a specific page:

    $ gm convert -density dpi infile.pdf[page] outfile.jpg

With Poppler to convert all pages:

    $ pdftoppm -jpeg -r dpi infile.pdf outfileroot

With Poppler to convert a specific page:

    $ pdftoppm -jpeg -r dpi -f page -singlefile infile.pdf outfileroot

### Splitting PDF pages

With mupdf-tools to split every page vertically into two pages:

    $ mutool poster -y 2 in.pdf out.pdf

Can be used to undo simple imposition.

### Add signature.png or image to one of the pages in the PDF

Adding an image to any location in a PDF can be done

- with ImageMagick (convert), xvAUR and pdftk. (Wrapper script)
- with xournalAUR
- with LibreOffice

Details on these and other solutions can be found on StackExchange.

### Add digital signature to PDF

jsignpdfAUR can digitally sign PDF files with X.509 certificates in GUI and CLI.

Readers such as Okular and MuPDF can sign PDFs with digital signatures. This requires a PFX certificate, which can be created with an OpenSSL command:

     $ openssl req -x509 -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout cert.pem -out cert.pem
     $ openssl pkcs12 -export -in cert.pem -out cert.pfx

MuPDF users can then sign PDFs with the `cert.pfx` using the graphical interface, or its mutool-sign tool.

Okular users must import `cert.pfx` into a certificate store such as the one in the default Firefox profile.[7] With Firefox this is done through Settings -> Privacy & Security -> View Certificates -> Your Certificates -> Import and selecting ```cert.pfx`. Afterwards Okular will offer this certificate to be used when signing PDFs.

Libreoffice can also sign PDFs.[8]

### Removing annotations from a PDF

With perl-cam-pdfAUR:

    $ rewritepdf.pl -C in.pdf out.pdf

See https://superuser.com/a/1051543 for more information.

## DjVu tools

- DjVuLibre provides many command-line tools, like ddjvu(1) for example.
- img2djvu — Single-pass DjVu encoder based on DjVu Libre and ImageMagick.

  https://github.com/ashipunov/img2djvu || img2djvu-gitAUR

- pdf2djvu — Creates DjVu files from PDF files.

  https://jwilk.net/software/pdf2djvu || pdf2djvuAUR

### Convert DjVu to images

Break Djvu into separate pages:

    $ djvmcvt -i input.djvu /path/to/out/dir output-index.djvu

Convert Djvu pages into images:

    $ ddjvu --format=tiff page.djvu page.tiff

Convert Djvu pages into PDF:

    $ ddjvu --format=pdf inputfile.djvu ouputfile.pdf

You can also use --page to export specific pages:

    $ ddjvu --format=tiff --page=1-10 input.djvu output.tiff

this will convert pages from 1 to 10 into one tiff file.

### Processing images

You can use scantailor-advanced to:

- fix orientation
- split pages
- deskew
- crop
- adjust margins

### Make DjVu from images

There is a useful script img2djvu-gitAUR.

    $ img2djvu -c1 -d600 -v1 ./out

it will create 600 DPI `out.djvu` from all files in `./out` directory.

Alternatively, you can try didjvuAUR, which seems to create smaller files especially on images with well defined background.

## PostScript tools

- pstotext — Converts PostScript files to text.

  https://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/pstotext.htm || pstotext

- Ghostscript

### ps2pdf

ps2pdf is a wrapper around ghostscript to convert PostScript to PDF:

    $ ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 -dOptimize=true -dEmbedAllFonts=true YourPSFile.ps

Explanation:

- with `-sPAPERSIZE=something` you define the paper size. For valid PAPERSIZE values, see [9][dead link 2022-09-22 ⓘ].
- `-dOptimize=true` lets the created PDF be optimised for loading.
- `-dEmbedAllFonts=true` makes the fonts look always nice.

Note: You cannot choose the paper orientation in ps2pdf. If your input PS file is healthy, it already contains the orientation information. If you are trying to use an Encapsulated PS file, you will have problems, if it does not fit in the `-sPAPERSIZE` you specified, because EPS files usually do not contain paper orientation information. A workaround is creating a new paper in ghostscript settings (call it e.g. "slide") and use it as `-sPAPERSIZE=slide`.

## Libraries

- libharu — C library for generating PDF documents.

  https://github.com/libharu/libharu || libharu, Lua binding: lua-hpdfAUR

- PoDoFo — A C++ library to work with the PDF file format.

  https://podofo.sourceforge.net || podofo

### Python

- PDFMiner — Utils to extract, analyze text data of PDF files. Includes pdf2txt, dumppdf, and latin2ascii

  https://www.unixuser.org/~euske/python/pdfminer/ || python-pdfminer, pdfminerAUR

- pdfrw — A pure Python library that reads and writes PDFs.

  https://github.com/pmaupin/pdfrw || python-pdfrw, python2-pdfrwAUR

- PyPDF3 — A pure-Python library built as a PDF toolkit.

  https://github.com/sfneal/PyPDF3 || python-pypdf3AUR

- PyX — Python library for the creation of PostScript and PDF files.

  http://pyx.sourceforge.net || python-pyx

- ReportLab — A proven industry-strength PDF generating solution

  https://www.reportlab.com/ || python-reportlab, python2-reportlabAUR

## See also

- List of applications/Documents#Readers and viewers
- List of applications/Documents#OCR software
- Wikipedia:List of PDF software
- PDF References
  - PDF Reference and Adobe Extensions to the PDF Specification
  - Wikipedia:PDF#Further reading

Categories:

- Applications
- File formats
- Lists of software
- Software comparisons

Hidden categories:

- Pages with dead links
- Pages or sections flagged with Template:Accuracy