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Looking for PDF collaboration (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I am looking for a solution to collaborative PDF editing (mostly annotations). I already have a Nextcloud installation with Office for several members so it would be great if it could be integrated, but it is not necessary.

What I mainly want is the possibility to add and view annotations made by several users on the same file at the same time.

Do you have a suggestion?

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[–] 6 points 10 months ago (10 children)

I can't attest to any as I don't use PDFs this way, but here are a few links:

Stirling PDF

PdfDing

BentoPDF

All of these are self-hostable and FOSS. I'm not sure about NextCloud integration.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    I don't use PDFs that much either, and often wonder who are these people who use so many PDFs, but I hear raves about Stirling PDF. I thought PDFs were like legacy gen.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    What do youngstar use nowadays if it isn't PDF? EPUB?

    I always wondered, why someone would prefere to read an EPUP instead of a PDF ! Specially Student books, cook books or any other book with images or representations.

    Yeah EPUB's are good for long text stories without any image, but everything else should be in pdf.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    The only thing I use the PDF format for is ebooks. I just always thought PDFs were something you spammed geriatric people with to get them to fall prey to your scam. LOL Like CD/DVDs. Someone here was talking about CD/DVDs a while back, and I got to thinking, I haven't burned a CD in at least a decade.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    I will look into these, do you know if they support collaborative annotations?

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    Stirling PDF

    https://docs.stirlingpdf.com/Functionality/Read-and-Annotate/

    Read & Annotate is a full-featured PDF viewer that lets you:

    • Read PDFs in a clean, focused interface
    • Add annotations, comments, and notes
    • Highlight and markup text
    • Draw freehand on pages
    • Add shapes, arrows, and callouts
    • Insert text boxes and sticky notes
    • Collaborate by marking up documents
    • Save annotated PDFs for sharing

    Think of it as your digital PDF notepad - read, review, and mark up documents all in one place.

    It says it do. Other than that, I've never deployed it.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 10 months ago* (2 children)

    I have an installation of Stirling PDF, but in my short experiment it had no ability to collaborate on the same document.

    Every edit created a new copy of the document downloaded to the user. The annotations weren't tagged to the individual user and sending different versions of a PDF from user to user is not what I am looking for.

    Stirling is a single user software in that regards. I haven't tested the also mentioned BentoPDF but I suspect it to be the same as it is also trying to be a PDF toolbox like Acrobat. PdfDing has a slightly different approach it might be an option if OnlyOffice does not work out.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Hmmmm...sorry to steer you wrongly. I mean, gosh it says it does all annotation and collaboration. I assumed 'collaboration' to mean multi-user collaboration. Hard to collaborate by yourself.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 10 months ago

    I am thankful for any input. Maybe it helps someone else looking for a similar thing.

    I think the collaborative part means sending PDFs from user to user and maintaining the ability to edit annotations. That may work for many use cases - a lot of businesses may be fine with that when email is still the communication medium of choice.

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    • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    I think OnlyOffice supports that. There is an extension for that for Nextcloud.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

    I tried that. It opens PDFs in Impress (their PowerPoint) and provides only a very basic annotation interface.

    I was wrong. I was using Nextcloud Office not OnlyOffice.

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    • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    will you want version control ?

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    • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    My team does this, but we collaborate in Markdown, and then one of us converts it into a PDF when we finish.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 10 months ago

    That's not an option unfortunately. The actual use case is a non-profit sports club magazine which needs to be proof read by several people at the same time. There is a fixed release date and only a few days to proof read the PDF before it needs to be sent to print.

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