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?
My team does this, but we collaborate in Markdown, and then one of us converts it into a PDF when we finish.
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.
I can’t attest to any as I don’t use PDFs this way, but here are a few links:
All of these are self-hostable and FOSS. I’m not sure about NextCloud integration.
I will look into these, do you know if they support collaborative annotations?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You don’t interact much with lawyers and government in your work, I take it?
I try to keep lawyers, government, and other ne’er-do-wells off my farm, yes.
I think OnlyOffice supports that. There is an extension for that for Nextcloud.
I have installed OnlyOffice Community Edition and it seems to work. I need to test it with a few others over a real connection (not just locally), but it seems promising.
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.
OnlyOffice doesn’t have “Impress”. I think you are confusing that with LibreOffice or Collabora Office.
You might be right.
I think you may be thinking of LibreOffice
will you want version control ?
Not necessary, no.
