Through a lot of searching, I started using PDF Studio and it’s better today than it has ever been. It’s two single greatest features is that it is not a subscription model and it runs fantastically well on Linux, specifically, openSUSE Tumbleweed, my preferred, tasty flavor of Linux.
My story with PDF Studio started in 2008. I had been using Linux, full-time, for 4 years at this point and was seeking some way to do more than just view PDFs. I found this application and have been using it since.
When considering a professional, PDF productivity application for any platform, PDF Studio will easily fit the bill and you are likely to be incredibly pleased with its features, performance and price. Adobe Pro has gone to a subscription model and still, after all these years, does not support Linux, so even more reason to use PDF Studio. If that isn’t enough, here are hand picked selection of reasons why you should try it out or maybe just make the switch to it.
Interface
I am not real picky on how my interface looks but what is important to me is that there is a dark mode and that the features, clicks and picks are all nicely arranged in some sort of logical manner. Thankfully, PDF Studio has been good at this for as long as I have used it but their latest dark mode is absolutely fantastic.
It works great on High DPI screens and plays great with KDE Plasma using Wayland with varied, per-screen, scaling. The point here is, the user experience in a multi-monitor setup with varied screen resolutions is top notch.
Merging / Splitting Multi-page PDFs
One of the great features that, admittedly, I don’t use as much as I used is splitting and merging PDFs. The ability to take a multi page PDF, lets say, from a batch scan and split out various pages to separate documents is invaluable.
There are some open source and free tools for this but the way PDF Studio provides the tooling, is quite fantastic. Additionally, being able to merge pages into a single PDF document is another absolutely fantastic capability. PDF Studio allows users to merge or split multi-page PDFs with ease, which is a valuable feature for anyone working with digital documents.
Scanning and Cropping Pages
I currently do not use the scanning feature within PDF Studio because my workflow is to use the scanning interface on the printer to send the files to a network folder but I do think this is a great feature to have bundled within the application. I do, however take those scanned documents and depending on the source, I’ll crop it down to exactly what I need. Users can easily crop scans of pages to remove unwanted margins or backgrounds, making it easier to work with digitized content and refine the project to something that doesn’t look like a sloppy scan. There are some resources I could only purchase physically in a spiral bound form and using my scanner, along with the cropping feature of PDF Studio, I could easily and quickly make for a nice digital reference.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
This might be my favorite feature PDF Studio provides. The OCR capabilities enable text recognition within scanned documents, making the content searchable and copy/paste-friendly. Since I take all my bills, statements and invoices, digitize them, I am able to use this OCR feature to turn that graphical text into actual
Digital Signatures and Stamps
Signing PDFs has been a feature that has been sorely lacking in Linux for some time, especially with the PKCS #11 certificates. This is built into PDF Studio now which is great, however, my current employment situation doesn’t require this anymore. You can also create your own digital ID as well. This truly is a great feature of this application.
Conversion from Microsoft Office Files
Depending on your activity in an office environment, you may have to create forms for various purposes. PDF Studio can create PDFs directly from Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents, making it a convenient tool for anyone working with these file formats.
Such functionality can be an efficiency enhancement. At another point in my life where I was more heavily involved in administrative tasks, this would have been an absolutely fantastic feature to have available to me.
Installation and Upgrades
PDF Studio is not free software, it is commercial and as such it is not distributed in a traditional Linux sense. They do offer a trial which I would highly recommend doing if you think you need such an application.
The download is a .sh file that just needs to be made executable (if not already, I don’t actually remember changing the permissions on it).
Once you launch it, you will get a kind of “Windows like” installation experience and it is all pretty automatic. What is rather nice is that you can opt to install it at the user level which will make adding this application to any immutable OS problem free.
You are also free to install PDF Studio anywhere you want in your home directory, so if you have some sort of specific way you like to organize your home directory, you will not have to fight the installer or do cheetah flips to make it work for you.
Once installed, you are greeted with a nice welcome screen and an easy way to enter the license key. If you are not ready for that, continue to “Try PDF Studio”.
Since I have upgraded over the years, they cut you quite a deal on upgrades but also do allow you to run the application in perpetuity. You pay one time and have access to the software as long as you like which is absolutely wonderful. Another benefit is that you do get some amount of time of upgrades. I don’t recall the exact time-frame but this is nice and you are notified when there are updates available.
Final Thoughts
There are many more features you can dig into with PDF Studio but these are the ones I use the most. Could I do all these things with open source only? No, no I can’t as I have tried. I also know that people use PDF productivity applications for a variety of reasons so what hit the spot for me may not at all be what would interest you. So, download the trial and see what you think? I’m sure your feedback would be appreciated.
Qoppa has been a steady supporter of my favorite operating system, Linux, providing PDF Studio and has allowed me to do the administrative tasks necessary for well over a decade. It gets better and better with every release and don’t force you to upgrade or “subscribe” to have access to the software. This is how commercial software should be and Qoppa does a great job of being a great software house. I do hope they continue to be this way. I am very glad I have the choice to support a company and vote with my dollars whey they do good.
Please Qoppa, keep being great! Keep supporting Linux and please don’t move over to that awful subscription model.
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