This toolset is also useful when you’re given a PDF, instead of generating it yourself, or when you’re working through revisions on a document that you’re handing back and forth among a team. You can also delete objects, or redact parts of a document-this is true redaction, where the underlying data is removed, rather than just a black bar being overlaid. Like Acrobat, PDFpen is a rich PDF editor, letting you work with text, images, attachments, and annotations, and edit anything that appears on a page, including all of those elements. That’s partly because Smile chose to use a straightforward toolbar (introduced a few versions back) mirrored in a Tools menu to spell it all out. PDFpen has seemingly nearly as many features and options as Adobe Acrobat, but I consistently find myself able to figure out how to accomplish what I want in PDFpen, while I often have to consult web documentation and poke around in Acrobat to get to where I’m going. Most of the remaining version 9 changes are fiddly things everyone will appreciate (like showing resizing handles for items that are off the edge of the page), or for which people with specific needs will suddenly breathe a sigh of relief (such as horizontal OCR for ideographic languages, like Chinese, in PDFpenPro). It also allows a range of image resolution (really density measured in dots per inch) in making the conversion. This latest version does a bit more, adding a host of image formats and options that include 1-bit TIFF (black-and-white), grayscale export, and JPEG and PNG files. While Preview and Acrobat have had relatively robust ways to export pages from PDF into other formats, it’s one area that PDFpen has lagged in.

It also now merges TOC entries when combining files. PDFpenPro allows substantially more advanced TOC options for more sophisticated and less clunky interaction. Table of contents editing in the Pro version of PDFpen brings it close to Acrobat parity.įor those who require a table of contents (TOC) or need to work with one created elsewhere, Acrobat has been your best choice until now. You can also choose to print just annotations, making it easier to review comments separately from the document as another PDF or in print form. Version 9 makes it possible to select multiple annotations at once, copy the text, delete them, and show highlights in the Annotations sidebar view. However, in previous versions, it was slightly harder to work with these annotations. It’s one of PDFpen’s strongest features, offering easily accessible, multiple tools for highlighting, adding comments, striking through text, and the like. Smile has focused on improving annotations used to comment on a PDF, export formats and controls, and table of contents support (Pro version only)Īnnotations let you mark up a PDF and share the results without modifying the underlying PDF. Version 9 isn’t nearly as big an upgrade, but it’s packed full of enhancements and additions, notably a large variety of image export options and better annotation management, useful when marking up a PDF.įor those who already use or know PDFpen, let me jump to the chase about new features in version 9.

Version 8 of both apps added many elements found in Acrobat that were still missing in PDFpen, like digital-signature management and validation, and new kinds of export methods from PDF to other formats, including Word. There’s a slight awkwardness in picking, setting values for, and switching among the app’s several tools, but it’s minor compared to its utility and ease of use once you’re using a tool. The Pro flavor is also a superb way to design forms, retrofit existing documents to contain form fields, and to fill out forms. Both editions can create and edit the contents of PDFs, allow drawing and adding text on top of files, and include excellent optical character recognition (OCR) software. The macOS software is both exhaustively featured and generally intuitive.

You can easily fix failed recognition, too. Powerful OCR works even with rough original, like this example from 1917.

Pdfpen pro ocr