Whilst EVINCE is a very capable PDF Viewer, if you have a need to fill in editable PDF forms it is required to install the Adobe PDF Reader. sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ precise partner" sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install acroread PS: If anybody is aware of an Open Source alternative to the Adobe Reader for editable form please leave a comment !
When you need to convert multiple documents to PDF for distribution (or from one Office format to another) there are a few utilities around. The most workable I found is the UNOCONV utility which is build on top of LibreOffice / OpenOffice. This uses the OpenOffice conversion facilities rather than a simple PDF print driver. On Ubuntu it can be installed via Software Center or via apt-get from the core repositories. sudo apt-get install unoconv Combined with the -exec option of the Unix find command this makes conversion of whole directory structures a breeze. #find all Word Documents and convert to PDF find . -name "*.doc*" -exec unoconv -f pdf {} \; #find all Powerpoint Documents and convert to PDF find . -name "*.ppt*" -exec unoconv -f pdf {} \; To show all the possible conversion formats you can use: unoconv --show The following list of document formats are currently available: bib - BibTeX [.bib] doc - Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP [.doc] doc6 - Microsoft Word 6.0 [.doc] doc95 - Microsoft Word 95 [.doc] docbook - DocBook [.xml] html - HTML Document (OpenOffice.org Writer) [.html] odt - ODF Text Document [.odt] ott - Open Document Text [.ott] ooxml - Microsoft Office Open XML [.xml] pdf - Portable Document Format [.pdf] rtf - Rich Text Format [.rtf] latex - LaTeX 2e [.ltx] sdw - StarWriter 5.0 [.sdw] sdw4 - StarWriter 4.0 [.sdw] sdw3 - StarWriter 3.0 [.sdw] stw - Open Office.org 1.0 Text Document Template [.stw] sxw - Open Office.org 1.0 Text…