I just had extreme pain with this.
Apart from broken PDF tools, GIMP 2.99.x is already really nice. I recommend the Flatpak from flathub-beta.
The 2 big browsers dont seem to support arithmetic coded JPEG at least in PDF!
They will simply display blank pages!
Lets do a list
Tools that are broken
Linux
- Firefox / Librewolf (RPM)
- likely Chromium (see below)
- Scrivano (Flatpak)
- QPDF Tools (Flatpak) (and I suppose qpdf too)
- Rescribe OCR (Flatpak)
- JPEG2PDF (Flatpak, displays correctly but broken image pipe)
- Arianna (Flatpak, not sure if supports PDF)
- NightPDF (Electron/Chromium, Flatpak)
(I dont recommend that software but it works for that purpose. See my list of recommended Flatpak apps here)
Android
- Mull (Firefox Android)
- GrapheneOS PDF, Cuprum PDF, MJ PDF (Chromium Webview)
- SavPDF (maybe also Webview)
Web
- pdf24.org (webservice)
- StirlingPDF (Docker/Podman container)
IOS
- Safari PDF viewer (iOs 16.7.2)
Software that works
Linux, Flatpak (likely also native package)
- KDE Okular
- GNOME Evince (Document Viewer)
- Inkscape
- Libreoffice Draw
- PDF Arranger (libqpdf 11.9.0, pikepdf 8.15.1)
- Bookworm 1.1.2
- KOReader
- Sioyek
- CorePDF
- gImageReader
Android
- muPDF
- Collabora Office
- KOReader, Librera, Orion Viewer (all dont support modern filesystem permissions)
Lets report some issues?
Are you sure that the GIMP isn’t broken? Is it possible that the images it produces are in some cases improperly formatted?
I dont know, maybe?
Some tools work though, so I suggest GIMP is fine