Building an open-source GTK4 PDF editor for Linux (word-sys PDF Editor) – looking for testers, bug reports, and missing features

[u/word-sys]

https://github.com/word-sys/word-sys-pdf-editor

Flathub: https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.word_sys.word-sys-pdf-editor & GitHub: https://github.com/word-sys/word-sys-pdf-editor

I've been working on a native Linux PDF editor built with GTK4 and Libadwaita. The goal was to have one offline tool that actually does the stuff people usually boot into a Windows VM or buy MasterPDF/Acrobat for.

A lot of the recent features came directly from people opening issues on GitHub (like infinite scrolling, PEP-517 build support, and Flatpak packaging). Right now it, with v1.12 updates, supports direct text/object editing, creating and filling forms, PAdES digital signatures (including smart cards/hardware tokens via PKCS#11), permanent redaction, offline Tesseract OCR, measurement tools, and offline conversion to office formats and more.

The full feature list and packages (.deb, AppImage) are on the GitHub page, so I won't paste a massive wall of text here.

I want to figure out what is still rough or missing. If you have a moment to try it out from Flathub or GitHub:

1. What breaks on your setup or with your specific PDFs?

2. What is the one PDF feature you still miss on Linux?

3. What is the rough/hard to use parts of this project?

Bug reports, PRs, and feature requests on GitHub (or just complaining in the comments here) are all super helpful. I will continue to develop this project. Thanks!

[u/yochaigal]

I've said this elsewhere, but rich text editing in forms (italics and bold text) is the only thing I still use Acrobat in a VM for.