Stirling PDF is a free, open-source rival to the industry-leading Adobe PDF document editor and comes with a wealth of useful capabilities.
The application is available here as a Windows or Mac installer, but also as a docker implementation
The compose.yml file is very simple requiring a few file locations to be set (assuming you want to place them in a different location to the default directories), along with the port to expose for connectivity
Using Stirling is simple, just chose the action you wish to perform – so, for example converting PDF to markdown
Use the prompt to upload the PDF to the server
Then click convert – Stirling will run the service and then automatically download the converted file back to your device
Easy!
If you need to conduct more than one operation on a PDF, then pipelines allow you to combine multiple operations into one seamless stream – You can then save the pipeline as a reusable template
The DPF Multi-Tool allows you to import a PDF and then edit individual pages by rotating them, cropping them, or even adding page breaks.
If all you want to do is simply read a PDF, then Stirling does that with ease too with the View/Edit PDF option
When viewing a PDF you have some edit tools available such as highlighting text, adding annotations or inserting images