For a long time now I’ve been using kpdftool, LO Draw, pdf90 and other gui and cmdline apps to deal with pdf files at work.
But I’ve missed the functionality of Adobe Acrobat (signing, editing) which, bloated as it is, is easier to use as it has all tools in one gui. Searching around I saw a few options, on- and off-line, and what came closer of what I need at work is java-based PDF Studio from a company called Qoppa (sounds weird to me, as in Portuguese Q and O are never together, there’s always an U between them).
They have a 30-day test bundle you can activate, and as always for corporate use the pro version is the one to go, as it has OCR and other capabilities I wanted.
However, although my HP3800 scanner is working OK on my system (oS 11.4 64-bit), the app wouldn’t find it. The troubleshooting section of their site says the saned daemon has to be running, and point to some highly convoluted (and possibly outdated) cmdline solutions way above what I’m willing to expend time on. Fortunately none of that was necessary. I just had to enable sane-port in Yast>Network Services>Network Services (xinetd).
OCR works well enough, even if there’s no Portuguese language pack.
So I ended up forking out the $130 or something for the pro version that can be installed in two machines concurrently. It will go down as a business expense…