PDFrankenstein is a GUI PDF annotator which uses Inkscape for editing.

What can you do with it?

• Put your signature on documents.
• Fill forms.
• Add clickable links.
• Draw on documents and highlight areas.
• Multiple page PDFs are supported.
• Anything you can do in Inkscape.

Requirements

• Recent version of Inkscape
• poppler-utils
• qpdf >=10.0.2
• Go 1.18 (build only)

Install

Packages are available for:

• Arch Linux: yay -S pdfrankenstein
• mise: mise use -g ubi:oxplot/pdfrankenstein

Download

Download the latest version from the releases page. Alternatively, you can checkout and build the code:

git clone https://github.com/oxplot/pdfrankenstein.git
cd pdfrankenstein
go build # This will take a LOOOOONG time
./pdfrankenstein

How does it work?

When you select a page to annotate, it's converted to SVG, made into a locked background of another SVG which is opened in Inkscape for you to draw on. After annotating all the pages needed, saving the file will go through all the annotated pages, and for each removes the added background, exports the page to PDF and finally overlays each annotation on the corresponding page of the orignal PDF and outputs the final file.

Inkscape is used much like vim or emacs are used as your editor in the shell when you run crontab -e. Instead of crontab implementing its own editor, it creates a temporary file, runs vim and checks if the file is updated after vim is closed.