PDF4QT For Linux

PDF4QT is a free, open-source, and cross-platform PDF editor/suite for both Windows and Linux. Yes, it's called this way because it is indeed powered by the famous Qt framework.

PDF4QT is definitely not the first, nor the only open-source PDF editor out there, but I find these types of apps quite interesting. They usually do a good job of providing users with a free alternative to other, more established, commercial PDF editors.

The question is, is PDF4QT good? And, more to the point, can it be used as an alternative to other paid products? To answer this question, we'll look at the app's underpinnings, its features, and how it feels to use.

As mentioned at the start, it's powered by the Qt framework. The app also makes use of a very robust C++ library and a neat command-line tool.

Some of the third-party libraries used for this projects are libjpeg, FreeType, OpenJPEG, OpenSSL, LittleCMS, and zlib.

This also probably the best time to point out that the app comes with multithreading support, as well as support for hardware accelerated rendering.

The whole point of PDF4QT is to offer the user a complete PDF viewing, and editing experience. What's actually impressive is that, for the most part, it manages to do exactly that, despite it being an open-source project build in someone's free time.

The app is basically a PDF suite with four applications. These are as follows: PDF4QT Viewer Profi, PDF4QT Viewer Lite, PDF4QT DocPage Organizer, and PDF4QT DocDiff.

The Viewer Profi app provides the bulk of the features including encryption, document reading, digital signature verification, annotation editign, and as well as support for text searching (via regular expressions).

The Viewer Lite app is all about providing a simplified PDF viewing experience, the DocPage Organizer does what its name says and allows you to manage individual pages of documents (as well as merge, split, move, clone, and add pages if you want). Lastly, the DocDiff app allows you to compare two PDFs and spot the differences.

Other things PDF4QT can do are optimize PDFs (reduce the file size without loss of quality), audio book conversion, and read PDFs in audio form (text-to-speech capabilities).

There's no getting around the fact that this is a product built by a small team and not a big corporation. Hence, it shouldn't come as a surprise that PDF4QT is not exactly the most stylish app of this sort out there.

The GUI itself is decent, but it doesn't have that design cohesion that some paid apps of this sort provide. Visuals aside, PDF4QT works as expected, and that's all that matters at the end of the day.