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I can find many applications that will convert from .odt to .pdf but I can't seem to find any that'll do the reverse. I've recently had a spate of forms to complete that only come in .pdf and my handwriting is atrocious. Many years ago I had a program (can't remember its name and prob pirate anyway) that would convert the file to .doc and it was easily finished.

Is there a Linux application that will do this?

This seems to be what you are looking for http://askubuntu.com/questions/166875/c ... s-in-a-pdf

I have tested it out and it works by annotating an existing pdf and then resaving as a pdf.

Libreoffice is supposed to be able to edit pdf files. I can't tell you for sure because I don't use it, but it must be worth a look. In fact I use Abiword and even it can edit them and save them as .odt so you could try that instead if you don't want the Libreoffice bloatware.

Thanks to you both for your replies and I'm sorry it's taken so long for me to get back to this.

I looked at Xournal as was suggested in your link @Fornhamfed but it was basically just overlaying a text layer on the document and re-saving it as .pdf. When you open a .pdf file with LibreOffice (when you have pdfimport installed) it opens in LibreDraw which allows you to do the same thing so that was not what I was looking for.

I did try AbiWord @viking but that messed up the formatting of the document when I opened it and was not usable for me in this case.

I ended up resorting to overlaying text boxes in LibreDraw which gave me results but took some fiddling with alignment and such. I did discover that the document had a couple of text boxes built in. They were not obvious. I only found them by accidentally clicking on the area but LibreDraw did allow me to enter text into those boxes also. If the .pdf file is pre-formatted with interactive text boxes (and you can find them), then I'd imagine LibreDraw works fine.

I didn't find what I was looking for but I did achieve a result and that was something. Thanks for your input.

Not sure this will help people who come across this post in the future (like I just did), but just in case:

http://www.ihaveapc.com/2012/09/quickly ... intubuntu/


Obviously...it's aimed at Ubuntu but should work on Mint too since it's built on Ubuntu.