Qpdf[1], and, in particular, libqpdf, is the most useful PDF tool I've ever used, because it was the first library I found that works at the proper level of abstraction for dealing with the PDF file format on its own terms. In other words, the library directly exposes the essential PDF object structure (pages, dictionaries, strings, numbers, streams, etc.) for easy editing, while abstracting away as much of... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago

Given how well Preview.app and Safari work for viewing >99% of PDFs I actually encounter in the wild, this article makes Apple's engineering decisions look good. It also confirms many suspicions I've had over the years that have led me to, e.g., running all PDFs from questionable sources through VirusTotal before viewing on platforms where I wouldn't normally run antivirus software. The original article also... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago

I know you're talking about GUI editing, but I've found libqpdf[1] incredibly useful for making programmatic PDF edits with minimal (typically no) structural disturbance. [1] https://qpdf.sourceforge.io. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago

Exiftool edits to PDFs are reversible. The file needs to be re-linearized by a utility such as qpdf. See the exiftool PDF tags page and exifcleaner issue #111. Source: over 1 year ago

Page organization => If you want a gui, you could use pdfshuffler or pdfsam, though I usually use command like tools like qpdf (or pdftk, stapler, pdfjam, or even ghostscript). Source: about 2 years ago

... That happens to be a Python alternative to PDFtk[1]. It’s been kind of abandoned in recent years, though. Also, in the early times of OLE 2.0 MS Office included a utility called Binder that could put several Office documents in a single file and edit them using a common interface. Nothing came of it. [1] https://github.com/hellerbarde/stapler. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago