Free pdf editing software recommendations?

[Telok]

As some here may know I've been editing a pdf book recently. It's mostly done but I'm running into a significant nuisance involving my current software.

The process involves splitting the original pdf into individual pages, editing them in LibreDraw, and recombining them. This process loses everything that isn't straight text or an image. Then, on lunch at work, I can optimize, fix, and clean the file with Adobe Pro. Now I'm at a point that I need to add annotations and do a couple last minor text fixes/spellings. Reworking any pages and recompiling would involve extra hours of re-fixing the pdf, bookmarks, forms, etc.

Issues:

Adobe Pro can't deal with the custom fonts in the pdf. It just cries and whines. On one page I'd like to adjust font size of a heading, and fixing spelling errors looks bad. Plus I only use it at lunch.

Adobe Reader won't do copy/paste in annotations on my home machine. A recurring random issue for years apparently, according to web searches. But it will do custom stamp icons. Also it dosen't do spellcheck.

Okular won't create annotations correctly at all, but it can edit thier text and will do copy/paste. Useful as the annotations currently exist in a text file and Okular does spellckeck.

Therefore:

My current options are spend 4-6 hours to resize a word and fix a typo, add stamps in adobe reader, edit the stamps in okular, finish formatting stamps in adobe reader.

Other software I've tried either can't do custom stamps and text changes, or won't keep the extras like bookmarks & forms intact. Some has turned out to be crippleware that won't save files over a page or file size.

So I turn to the collective wisdom of the playground. Anyone know of a free editor that can annotate with custom icons, deal with a custom font in fixing a typo or two, and not screw up the other bits of the pdf?

[gomipile]

One thing to consider: if the custom fonts were subsetted instead of embedded when the PDF was created, then the type of editing you want may not be possible without access to the original font.

[Ravens_cry]

How well would LibreOffice suit your needs?

[Telok]

The fonts are correctly embedded and I've extracted them. I'm currently using them in LibreDraw during editing. However LibreDraw is not happy when attempting to handle a 408 page, 24mb pdf with bookmarks, forms, notations, and scripts. Very, very, not happy.

Because they aren't standard fonts Adobe Pro can't hamdle them. Because they're custom it doesn't even seem able to have them loaded or installed anywhere to make it happy.

Edit: Insanity. Adobe Pro on a different computer let me change font size without screwing up the font. An old pdf editor from the early 2000s lets me change some words sometimes without corrupting and did ok for the typos (this time).

Still trying for annotations in a single progran instead of having to swap back and forth.

[gomipile]

Since you're using Adobe Pro, have you contacted Adobe support?

[Telok]

I only use Pro on lunch breaks at work. And dealing with a different machine got it to work for the font resizing.

You know... I'm pretty sure the reason the reader won't copy/paste is I'm running linux at home and using wine. I'll look into possible clipboard-to-wine issues and maybe try an old windows dual boot I haven't touched in a couple years. That might offer a solution.

[Browder]

I don't really trust free software. It seems to me that most of this software is buggy and not fully developed. For me it is better to use licensed software. But this is my personal opinion.

[truemane]

Metamagic Mod: Thread Necromancy.