grandiloquent exigence: PDFpen 6 for Mac Review

Thursday, March 21, 2013

PDFpen 6 for Mac Review

Smile Software has released a new version of PDFpen, a full-featured PDF editor. PDFpen 6 includes the ability to export in MS Word format, a new editing bar, and more.

The editing bar in PDFpen includes the ability to add text, notes, links, shapes, highlights, and photos. You can also chose to edit any text even though the file you're working with is technically a flattened PDF. You do this with the "Correct Text" tool and simply highlight the block of text you wish to change.

Another great feature of PDFpen is the ability to add commonly used imprints and characters used by teachers and editors when adding notes to a paper. These look like they are handwritten and you can upload your own as well.

PDFpen also does Optical Character Recognition (OCR) so that you can edit scanned documents. Scanned documents with text are technically just an image of text, but with OCR, PDFpen is able to convert that image into usable text with the help of the OmniPage OCR engine.

Some other features of PDFpen include the ability to add and edit images, combine PDFs, re-order pages, fill out interactive PDF forms, password protect your document, and more. PDFpen also support Dropbox and iCloud sync as well as the ability to save your document as a MS Word file (.doc or .docx).

The good

Add text, images and signatures to PDF
Correct text in original PDF with editable text blocks
Move, resize, copy and delete images in original PDF
Redact or erase text, including OCR text; use search-and-redact or search-and-replace
Adjust resolution, color depth and contrast in an image or scanned document
Scan directly from Image Capture or TWAIN scanners
Perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on scanned documents
Insert and remove pages; re-order pages in a PDF by drag & drop
Combine PDFs
Insert page numbers and specify positioning and format, including Roman numerals and Bates Numbering
Fill out interactive PDF forms
Add (and print) notes and comments
Mark up documents with highlighting, underscoring and strikethrough
Save frequently-used images, signatures, objects and text in the Library and sync that Library via iCloud
Save PDFs directly to Evernote
Password protect a document
Export to Microsoft? Word (.doc, .docx) format
Use iCloud or Dropbox for seamless editing with PDFpen for iPad and PDFpen for iPhone

The bad

When cropping a photo, you can't lock the aspect ratio
Effect tab has a bug. The first time you visit it, the previews display fine, but if you go to another tab and come back, the previews do not show.
Highlighter tool is a bit buggy

The bottom line

PDFpen is a great PDF editor for the Mac that is full-featured and easy to use. Personally, I prefer to do most of my annotating with an iPad (and there's a version of PDFpen for iPad), but I will definitely be turning to PDFpen for Mac for my other PDF editing needs like filling out forms and editing documents.