PDF viewer with selectable text

pdf

Is there a good PDF viewer in the Ubuntu sources that lets me select and copy text? Okular for KDE is a great app, as it has a far greater number of tools than Document Viewer does. I see the repos have Okular, but I would like to avoid installing all the KDE dependencies that come with it. However, all I really need to do is select and copy text from a pdf. What will allow me to do this?

Solution 1:

As mentioned in a comment, if text in a pdf document is selectable as text or not, depends on whether the text is in the document as an image or as text. In the latter case, all pdf viewers do support selecting text as far as I know.

No options with text in a pdf image?

You do have a few options however to make the text in a document "readable"

One relatively unknown, but imo very nice option to (also) convert pdf images to text is gimageReader:

enter image description here

It has a nice interface and reads the selected text, displayed next to your pdf document.

to install, use its ppa:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:sandromani/gimagereader
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gimagereader

Note

You might need/want to additionally install tesseract ocr tools for specific languages to use:

sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr

and specific languages, e.g.

sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr-eng

Specific languages can also easily be selected by using synaptic.

Edit

(at least) From 18.04, gImageReader is in the repositories, so no need to add the ppa manually anymore.

Solution 2:

Take a look for master PDF editor. It's a great application for all tasks you could do with a PDF file.

Some Features:

Edit PDF text, images and pages with full editing features
Create new PDF or edit existing ones.
Add and/or edit bookmarks in PDF files.
Encrypt and/or protect PDF files using 128 bit encryption.
Convert XPS files into PDF.
Add PDF controls (like buttons, checkboxes, lists, etc.) into your PDFs.

and many more features._source

You can download it from here.

Or you can install it directly:

 sudo apt-get install master-pdf-editor