For work, I create/edit quite a lot of PDF forms (with menus, fillable fields and JS scripts to process the contents). And I’m looking for an open source alternative for Linux…
I can find a lot of alternatives for Acrobat Reader, but everything seems to fall short as soon as I need to create/edit such forms. So… do any of you have recommendations? Or am I stuck to Windows (or OS X?) for Acrobat Pro? 
Probably impossible to get a free software that does everything a paid software does. At work we use Bluebeam, which is subscription-based. So, not for Linux.
Do you really care for open source FOSS? Or is “free (as in beer) and Linux” good enough?
I’m looking for a Linux alternative, because we’re looking which Windows (and to a lesser degree OS X) applications we’re reliant on for our core processes. A colleague and me are looking to challenge our team by switching our work machines over to Linux for a month to see where we get stuck.
We haven’t started yet, just taking inventory and making sure we can actually even start it. We have no budget for this, hence the FOSS requirement 
If it would work well, I don’t think a paid solution would be a problem. But for now those aren’t an option…
Is PDF editor the only application you are looking for? Meaning everything else in your work day already has a Linux option that satisfies your needs? I assume you have cleared that with IT or the bosses that you can just switch OS for a month?
FOSS is more than “free” (as in free beer). There is ton of free (as in no $) for Windows that is good etc. and you can use. You just don’t get the source code, and it may have licensing rules (i.e. you can’t use it and re-package it in your own software). For a normal user that is not a developer, it doesn’t matter, as long as the software works and is free to use legally. But for a developer who wants to use the FOSS software to make it their own, it matters.
If you are not a developer, and don’t plan to use a FOSS PDF editor to publish your own improved version, FOSS is meaningless to you. The idea of FOSS was to allow developers to fix software. That is what Stallman solved: IBM sold software, and if the company found a bug or wanted more features, they had to go back to IBM to have them fix it. FOSS allows the company to fix it themselves or add features. Great for developers! But if you are just a user (which it sounds like), you will never edit the source code, and FOSS is totally useless to you as long as the software is free.
That is why some distros include “non-free” (free as in freedom) software, even if it isn’t strictly FOSS. it is legally free to use. and some distros (for ideological reasons) don’t include “non-free” software and you as a user have to hunt it down yourselves.
I know confusing in English, but in Linux World free (no payment) and free (freedom to alter it) are different distinctions. A user not being a developer shouldn’t care.
For most things we found good alternatives. Or at least good enough for us to work with. And yes, we have the freedom to switch OS. If we run into things we can’t manage, we have back-up machines which just run Windows/OS X.
We have some processes where we haven’t found a good way to work around. Such as PowerAutomate for instance. And there certainly are some Office compatibility things which will be a challenge. But overall… Yeah, it should be doable.
And saying that FOSS is meaningless if you’re not a developer is a bit shortsighted if you ask me. I mean… do you want to limit your userbase like that?
But anyway, that isn’t the point here… From a personal perspective, I prefer open source from the philosofical standpoint. From a pure business standpoint, I don’t care as long as the costs are decent for the use we get out of the product.
I’m looking for a PDF editor which runs on Linux.
Due to this being our own initiative, we don’t have a budget to spend on it. But so far I haven’t really found anything decent to do more than annotate and create standard PDFs. Not anything remotely in the editing/creating I need. That’s what I’m looking for.
Keep in mind, a lot of FOSS software is a bit “unfinished” since the creator developed as much as they needed it to. This may be a bit different for software projects with well-funded teams (i.e. KDE). And the assumption is, if a user needs more features or finds bugs, they are free to create their own edition and hopefully provide the “fix” upstream to the original creator.
I never used LibreOffice, but their “Draw” software is supposed to have some PDF editing capabilities.
I use a few good free software in Windows (I do donate to projects, that create really good free software I use a lot). And they do have limitations in their EULA (for commercial use, or restricts re-using their source code etc.). Sometimes the donation edition adds some features I don’t really need.
However, if you do find a good free software and use it for work, your company could consider throwing them a few $ (even if they technically are not FOSS). OS develop, and software also needs to be developed to work on future OS.
I also don’t know if there is a legally binding (i.e. acknowledged in courts of law) definition of FOSS. It seems every entity defines it to their needs. i doubt there are so many really great free (no $) PDF editors that you can be picky 
Good luck and let us know what you end up with and how your experiment works out.
PDFGear as an Acrobat Pro replacement on Windows or Mac. Free, but not open source and no Linux version AFAIK.
I transitioned all of our legacy fillable PDFs to Jotform years ago which eliminated the headaches associated with Adobe being greedy jackwagons.
Hmm… I’ll take a look at PDFGear when I’m in the office again, I don’t have a Windows machine at home to test it
Jotform doesn’t seem to be what I need 
I’ll explain a bit more about my usecase, because that might help with what I actually need it for!
I work at a university and the forms I make are rubrics for assessing student works. Teaching staff fills in those forms instead of every subject/team having a different Word/Excel/whatever form. It was an attempt at unification of all rubrics for students across subjects and years. And also a way to make sure that the forms they use are less prone to user error when filling them in. When filled in, they need to be uploaded to the student administration systems as proof of their assessments.
We’re dealing with a lot of legacy stuff, regulations and committees about how things need to happen and what we need to keep records of. Typical uni stuff 
What’s wrong with LibreOffice?
Sounds more like the whole system should be online already. Teacher logs into a web-based system, fills out the web-based form and it is already in the system immediatley.
it sounds like they had a bad paper system, that they then replace with an electronic system (PDF), but don’t actually change the process.
Maybe i misunderstand, but it sounds like the PDF is just an interim step that still requires manual work. Skip the whole manual thing and make it all part of the “system”.
@diizzy
I’ll have to look into how far I can get with LibreOffice. I really dislike how they just cram everything and the kitchen sink in the interface. It’ll take quite a bit of searching how I can make it do what I need. And see how far I can get to replicate what I need.
But I’ll certainly take a look at it!
@Lurker
I would love to skip forms and have it web-based. But that isn’t something the student administration system supports…
I can’t control all systems in the chain. I’m limited to what I can do with systems on our faculty. And whatever the central IT provides us.
Besides, I can’t just try something web-based without going through a couple of those committees. Because I absolutely cannot just put any info about students in external systems. (Not if I want to keep my job and be able to work in education, government or the like at least…)
So… I’m stuck with local tools, which means electronic paper equivalents.
Does your university use Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 for staff email? Doing this in Google Forms or whatever the M$ equivalent is should be kosher.
Pretty much all higher education here uses M$. And I’ve run into the limitations of Forms loads and it isn’t usable for this.
Especially because of the requirement of needing a form to upload to the administration systems.
Although… I might be able to build something in PowerAutomate But that’ll make it impossible to have multiple examiners grade tests, which is a requirement for all subjects of 7 ECTS or higher
I just started using stirling-PDF to crop and reorganize multi-page text-based PDFs. It runs with docker, windows, and linux and is open-source. I haven’t spent too much time with it, but it seams like it has at least a basic automate/workflow implementation. It might be worth a look if you haven’t already and you are still looking for a solution.
Unfortunately, the conversion/export functions aren’t as robust as I’d like, but that seems to be where most Adobe-alternatives struggle. I’ve never been able to find an adequate replacement for AdobePro’s ability to take large, dense tables of material property data (like those in ASTM stainless steel standards) and dump them into Excel largely without issue. I’m looking at Camelot for table extraction with mixed results so far.
I haven’t had too much time to look into LibreOffice’ options yet. It has been quite busy lately
From what I’ve read from instructions, it should be doable to handle most things I do with forms. Haven’t encountered the javascript calculations I do with inputs though…
Biggest hurdle from what I encountered so far is that the UI of LibreOffice is so much less streamlined than Acrobat
I’ll take a look at what Stirling does and see if it can offer a smoother workflow. Thanks for the tip!
In my experience opening a PDF in LibreOffice results in a jumbled mess most of the time for anything but the simplest of PDFs.
Check these two out, they are supposed to be good alternatives to the full Acrobat Pro:
Neither are free but they do have the ability to run either in free mode or as a trial to test.
For private or client PDFs, a client-side/browser tool can merge, split, or compress files on your device, so the file never leaves it. PDF Merge Files is useful for those basic operations, but it is not a full Acrobat replacement for forms or signing.
Yeah, but that’s far too limited for what I need it to do.
Over the past time, I’ve looked into what I can do with LibreOffice. And while I can replicate most of what I need, it is a terrible workflow experience compared to Acrobat
So for now, I’ll accept that while possible, it isn’t a workable replacement.