I would like to know whether there is any possibility to read, highlight and annotate PDFs in LibreOffice?
If not, is this the right platform to make a feature request?
There is no good free tool to do so on Linux. I tried Mendeley which is quite good, but which forces the use of a cloud, clogging rapidly, and requiring money to expand.
In view of the existing tools available in LibreOffice, creating a PDF annotation etc. as in Mendeley would be brilliant.
I’ve successfully added annotations to PDF files using LibreOffice. In my case I had a couple of image and text based PDF files that I needed to add some text to. I opened them up in LibreOffice Draw and chose to insert a date field. However, this is just an ordinary text frame. It’s just to remove the added date from the text frame, make any adjustments to the text formatting and then export it to PDF again.
No, is the short answer - in the way I think you mean, which is ‘Can I do this in a similar manner that I expect in Mendeley/Adobe etc… ?’. LibreOffice can import a PDF using extensions but I don’t think this is what you are looking for - this would be useful if you were looking to edit the PDF and produce a new document.
What you are looking for is a PDF viewer with annotation tools - on Linux the best I think you’ll find, in terms of the features you need, is Okular. If your using a GNOME based distro, then you will have to stock up on many of the KDE libraries. The stock PDF viewer in Ubuntu, Evince, is fast and excellent for reading with but doesn’t have all the annotation tool you’ll need.
Alternatively, PDF XChange works great under WINE and the shareware version has everything you need without making you ‘Go Pro’. Plus, when you save in PDF XChange the annotations you’ve made are saved onto the PDF.
Thanks. Is it a possible feature to be requested in your opinion? Where can I propose it?
It’s a tricky one - libreoffice has all the annotations, highlighting and collaboration features for working on odf documents so I think it would be better for the community to focus on other issues, IMHO. Not sure how to post feature requests, people seem to use the forums or the bug trackers.
It’s a tricky one - Libreoffice has good support for creating PDFs and for creating a hybrid PDF that can be read back into libreoffice at 100% fidelity. Ultimately, libreoffice has all the annotations, highlighting and collaboration features for working on
You’re right. Libreoffice is not a pdf viewer/annotator and there’s not good pdf annotator for linux.
My solution is to use Foxit reader for windows with the latest version of wine (1.5).
Works great.
The instructions on how to set Foxit as the default pdf viewer may be found here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/94882/how-do-i-set-foxit-reader-for-windows-as-my-default-pdf-reader/95404#95404