Now. Why am I wrong for Libre
Everyone complaining here about not being able to have unique footers or moving images or ignoring spelling errors just doesn’t know what they’re doing. You’re literally the bad workman blaming the tool. I can do all of those things in Word.
If you prefer another tool, fine. But please stop shitting on things just because you don’t understand them.
And PDF was never meant to be edited. Its sole purpose is to give you a document file which comes out exactly the same on computer screens and printers everywhere. Compact, reliable, compatible. If you need to replace parts of a PDF document post publication, it should be prepared using the Forms tools that are readily available in all good PDF suites.
By the way: I paid 30 Euros for an Office 2019 lifetime license. If ever that should not receive further updates then I’m ready to fork over another 30.
And PDF was never meant to be edited
Lol what kind of dumb shit is this to say? There are tons of pdf editors out there, its fucking 2025 and we have incredible technology. Your entire post comes across as a pathetic apologist for multil billion dollars companies.
The web was also never meant to be dynamic. And yet.
I just want to write Markdown. I just want to write Markdown. I just want to write Markdown. I just want to write Markdown.
The thing I really hate about modern word processors and everyone’s obsession with PDFs is that the vast majority of the time things will never be printed, but everything still focuses on paginated formats. Nobody seems to get this but you can literally send someone a .HTML file that they can just open in their browsers. Even when I tell developers about this they say dumb things like a single file will load slower. Buddy, it’s loading from the disk, it’s not querying shit, it is okay to make it a single HTML file.
But no, fuck you, just pages and PDFs.
The silver lining is that at least Google Docs (I don’t use other editors often) now has a “pageless” mode. But the amount of times I’ve run into weird things like accidentally backspacing the last character of something with special formatting only to undo it, add extra characters temporarily, then backspace in front of it… Fucking hell. Just let me write Markdown. Just let me write Markdown! JUST LET ME WRITE MARKDOWN!
I must be the odd one. I find PDFs easy to use, convenient, easy to edit, and manageable. The business world relies quite a bit on PDF. The whole point of PDFs is that they can easily be printed, signed, be fillable forms, or stored as a single file where the size can be adjusted to fit storage requirements. The only issue I have with them is so many editors all want money for the ability to edit them whereas other document formats have software like LibreOffice that are free. I get you’re probably good at markdown, but the rest of the business world that relies on PDFs and can barely handle them or open a web browser. Their brains would melt if they couldn’t simply open or print a single file.
You find PDFs easy to edit? Also, there’s no reason why you can’t make a single HTML file the way you make a single PDF file. It’s not done in the web for organization and optimization reasons, but it’s still possible.
Also, what do you mean about resizable? Open a web browser, adjust the width. Look at the text. Watch as it moves. Do that with a PDF, absolutely not the same. PDFs have a static size.
Form filling with HTML is easy too. https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_forms.asp
Resizable as in file size. PDF quality is easily adjustable when saved.
Paginated formats still have advantages even if they are never printed. It just makes referencing stuff so much easier, if you can say “page 451, second headline, third paragraph”.
Even easier, for a markdown (text) file, you could just tell someone the line to go to.
If people used markdown instead, then everyone would have nice text editors installed which would make this easy.
Not to mention how much faster searching through a text file is compared to a word doc (eg, you could ctrl+f the headings name and have a result instantly).
If stuff like this was adopted, integrations could be very nice (with easier solutions than saying “go to x page and look for x header”, I could even imagine links being a thing assuming this feature is developed).
Not to mention how much faster searching through a text file is compared to a word doc (eg, you could ctrl+f the headings name and have a result instantly).
Why don’t you just ctrl+f in a word doc/PDF? That’s still possible, but it’s not exactly of much help in many cases. E.g. if the headline you are looking for is the name of a basic concept that appears all over in the document. Page 512 only appears once.
All other forms of indexing are content-dependant. Indexing by page works the same on any page-based document.
You can edit PDFs on libre?
You can in libreoffice draw for sure.
Yeah but it’s pretty limited and personally I could never get it to work, it couldn’t handle larger files. Had to pirate some other program to do anything serious.
Are there any good free pdf editors anyway? I’ve always had to use a premium product in the end 😔
i mean, pdf’s shouldn’t be edited. that’s the point of pdfs.
If pdfs weren’t supposed to be edited, they shouldn’t have mistakes that require editing.
They also should’ve saved the source files that they were created from, but don’t worry this PDF dates back 20 years and 3 of the people who maintained its annual updates have since retired, the last person who maintained it left the company on bad terms so good luck!
