LibreOffice as a PDF editor
2023-09-22, 16:00–16:30 (Europe/Bucharest), Room 2

A theoretical and practical discussion of the motivation for, merits of and challenges for LibreOffice as a program for acting on PDFs.


Is LibreOffice a PDF editor? This supposedly factual question is actually a matter of some debate, among users, developers and QA-people alike. We will present and consider the opposing answers to this question - which will lead us both in more abstract directions, as well as more concrete and empirical ones - how LO users employ it (or don't employ it) in practice for manipulating PDFs.

From this dual perspective, we will also break down the notion of an "Editor" into concrete kinds of editing/mutating tasks users are typically interested in performing on PDFs, and examine how LO caters to them today.

Finally, we will consider some potential courses of action for improving LO's effectiveness as a potential PDF editor - other than the maximalist "implement anything and everything a PDF editor would".

See also: Slides of the talk

Software Developer and researcher on occasion (GPU programming, medical scanner image reconstruction, Analytic DBMS acceleration) - but not working on LO code.

Key active user in LO's RTL, Hebrew language communities, active user in Arabic language community. Avid bug filer.

Somewhat of a C++ aficionado, with experience in CUDA, OpenCL, Javascript and bash.