Effectiveness
5 out of 5
It has all the basic features I need
5 out of 5
It has all the basic features I need
See PDFpenPro, which includes advanced features such as converting HTML to PDF, exporting PDF to XLSX, PPTX and PDF/A, creating Tables of Contents, building interactive forms, and more.
price
4.5 out of 5
Much cheaper than its competitors
4.5 out of 5
Much cheaper than its competitors
support
4 out of 5
Good documentation, responsive support
4 out of 5
Good documentation, responsive support
Quick Summary
PDFpen is an easy-to-use yet powerful PDF editor for Mac. You can mark up PDFs with highlights, drawings and comments. You can add or edit the text of a document. You can fill in forms and add a signature. You can even create searchable PDFs from paper documents. We often think of PDFs as read-only documents.
It’s like PDFpen gives you a superpower that used to be the domain of experts. PDFpen will even convert a PDF to Microsoft Word’s DOCX format for easy editing. A pro version is available with more advanced features.
You already have a basic PDF editor on your Mac – Apple’s Preview app does basic PDF markup, including adding signatures. If that’s all you need, you won’t need to purchase additional software. But if your editing needs are more advanced, PDFpen and PDFpenPro will give you the best bang for your buck. I recommend them.
What I Like
- Includes all of the PDF markup and editing features I need.
- Very easy to use.
- Securely redacts sensitive information.
- Useful for filling in PDF forms.
- Edited text does not alway use the right font.
- Crashed for some reviewers.
PDFpen & PDFpenPro
macOS, $74.95+
Quick Navigation
// Why You Should Trust Me?
// What Is PDFpen?
// PDFpen: What's in It For You?
// Reasons Behind My Reviews and Ratings
// Alternatives to PDFpen
// Conclusion
// What Is PDFpen?
// PDFpen: What's in It For You?
// Reasons Behind My Reviews and Ratings
// Alternatives to PDFpen
// Conclusion
Why Trust Me
My name is Adrian Try. I’ve been using computers since 1988, and Macs full time since 2009, and over those years PDFs have become increasingly important to me. In fact, Finder just found 1,926 PDF documents on my hard drive. And that doesn’t account for the many more I have stored in Evernote, Google Drive and elsewhere.
I have a large collection of eBooks in PDF format. I have collected, purchased and created a large number of training courses over the years, and most of them are PDFs. My birth certificate and other important documents have all been scanned as PDFs. In fact, a number of years ago I became almost 100% paperless, and spent months scanning large stacks of paperwork onto my computer as PDFs.
All of that was done using a variety of apps and scanners. I have heard good reviews about PDFpen, but have never tried it until now. Curious to see how it stacks up, I downloaded the demo.
I also activated the full version with a NFR license provided by Smile. Here’s how it looks:
Over the last few days I’ve given the app a good shake. The content in the summary box above will give you a good idea of my findings and conclusions. Read on for the details about everything I liked and disliked about PDFpen.
What Is PDFpen?
PDF documents are normally considered read-only. PDFpen changes all of that. It empowers you to edit the text of a PDF, mark up the document by highlighting, drawing and writing pop-up notes, fill in PDF forms, and even reorder pages. With the help of a scanner it will also help you create PDFs from paper documents.
Here are the main benefits of the app:
- Edit and correct the text inside PDF documents.
- Highlight text, circle words, and add other simple drawings to PDFs.
- Create searchable PDFs from paper documents.
Is PDFpen Safe to Use?
Yes, it is safe to use. I ran and installed PDFpen on my macOS Sierra based iMac. A scan found no viruses or malicious code.
Smile is a company with a long history of creating quality Mac software, and has an excellent reputation in the Apple community. PDFpen is used and recommended by many reputable Mac users, including David Sparks of the Mac Power Users podcast.
Is PDFpen Compatible with Windows?
PDFpen is a macOS application, and a version is available for iPhones and iPads. Although Smile has created a version of their TextExpander program for Microsoft Windows, they have NOT done the same for PDFpen.
However, there are a number of alternatives that allow you to work with PDF documents in Windows. These include Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, ABBYY FineReader, Nitro Pro and Foxit PhantomPDF.
PDFpen vs PDFpenPro
Smile has released two versions of their app. One includes all of the basic features most people (including myself) need. The other adds additional features at an additional cost, and is mainly aimed at those who need to create PDF documents and forms.
PDFpen costs $74.95, while the fuller-featured PDFpenPro costs $124.95. In this review, we are covering the features of the less expensive version.
What does the extra $50 buy you? PDFpenPro has all the features of PDFpen, plus the following:
And with the included SkyDrive app, you can manage both local files and SkyDrive files in one place.Fast, full-screen browsingWhen you get Windows 8.1 Preview, you also get to check out the new Internet Explorer. Windows 8.1 full free download. Internet Explorer 11 Preview is built for touch, with faster load times, a full-screen experience that includes side-by-side browsing of your sites, and real-time info delivered on your Start screen through live tiles for your favorite sites.
- Turn websites into PDFs
- Powerful form-building tools
- More export options (Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, PDF/A)
- Control over permissions
- Create and edit tables of contents
- Create links from URLs
- PDF portfolios.
PDFpen: What’s in It For You?
Since PDFpen is all about making changes to PDF documents, I’m going to list all its features by putting them into the following five sections. In each subsection, I’ll first explore what the app offers and then share my personal take.
Note: the screenshots below were taken from PDFpen 9.
1. Edit and Markup Your PDF Documents
PDFpen is a PDF editor, allowing you to edit anything that appears on a PDF page, including text, images, attachments and annotations. PDF is commonly thought of as a read-only format, so all of that power can make you seem like a magician to the uninitiated.
The ability to highlight text and draw circles around paragraphs can be of great help to students when studying, and teachers when grading papers. That sort of markup is also regularly used by editors when pointing out where corrections need to be made and changes are required. The ability to edit text allows you to fix the odd typo that made its way into the PDF without needing access to the original source document.
Highlighting, drawing and making notes is done with the mouse and the use of the appropriate buttons on the toolbar. To edit the text of a PDF, first select the text you want to modify or add to, then click the Correct Text button.
In the following screenshots you see me change “Canadian Compliance Statement” into “Australian Compliance Statement”.
Notice that the font used for the new text is very close, but not identical, to the original font. The location of the text was also a little different, but easy to move. While not a major problem, this heading will look a little different to the others. As I tested this in other PDF documents, it didn’t seem to be a problem unless an unusual font was used.
A lot of work has gone into making PDFpen accessible and easy to use. Glenn Fleishman of Macworld confirms: “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.”
Unfortunately, he also found some bugs when printing annotations, and lost work as a result. He was using the previous 9.0.1 release, and the app didn’t always crash when performing the same task.
My personal take: PDFs don’t have to be read-only documents. Marking up a document can be useful for your own reference, or when collaborating on a PDF with others. And being able to add and edit text in the PDF directly can be very handy, especially when you don’t have access to the original document the PDF was created from. PDFpen makes all of this easy to do.
2. Scan and OCR Your Paper Documents
PDF is arguably the best format to use when scanning paper documents onto your computer. But unless the scan is OCRed, it’s just a static, unsearchable photo of a piece of paper. Optical character recognition turns that image into searchable text, making it a much more valuable resource.
In his review of the app for Macworld, Glenn Fleishman found optical character recognition excellent. “The OCR software is highly accurate, even for extremely degraded text. I tried it on old newspaper pages with very small type, and it did remarkably well.”
My personal take: Scanned paper documents are much more useful when optical character recognition has been applied. PDFpen’s OCR is highly accurate, and in the rare case that it gets it wrong, you can fix it yourself.
3. Redact Personal Information
From time to time you’ll need to share PDF documents that contain text you don’t want others to be able to see. This might be an address or phone number, or some sensitive information. Redaction is where you hide this information (typically with a black bar), and is especially common in the legal industry.
PDFpen allows you to redact text either with a block, or by erasing it. This is done by selecting the text, then choosing the appropriate redaction option from the Format menu. In the following screenshot, you’ll see two paragraphs that have been redacted on the right. The first was redacted with a block, the second by erasing some of the text.
Glenn Fleishman of Macworld confirms that PDFpen’s redaction is secure. “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.” If that wasn’t true, then anyone with a copy of PDFpen could just remove the black bar you added and gain access to the sensitive information you were protecting.
My personal take: Redaction is important for keeping private or sensitive information secure. PDFpen accomplishes the job quickly, simply and securely.
4. Sign and Fill In Forms
PDFpen allows you to fill in PDF forms, including adding a signature. If you want to create forms, you’ll need PDFpenPro.
A few months ago my family moved interstate. We needed to handle a lot of paperwork, including filling out and signing lease documents, from a remote location. Although we used a different app at the time, PDFpen would make such tasks very simple.
Pdf Expert Vs Pdfpen Ipad
Mike Schmitz of The Sweet Setup found the signature feature easy to use once set up. “This takes a little bit of prep work in PDFpen, but once you have it set up you can easily reuse your signature by saving it to your library.”
To get started, you’ll need to scan your signature, drag it into PDFpen, and make the background transparent so it doesn’t hide any text in your document. You only need to do this once.
My personal take: PDF forms are a convenient way of filling in official paperwork. My wife is a nurse, and it’s a regular part of her professional life. PDFpen makes it easy.
5. Reorder and Delete Pages
Sometimes you may want to reorder the pages of your PDF, for example switching Page 1 with Page 3. Doing this in PDFpen is a simple drag-and-drop operation.
With the left pane in thumbnail view (which it is by default), you see an overview of your document page by page. Simply drag the page you want to move to its new location, and it’s done.
Mat Lu from Engadget had problems when reordering pages in large documents of 50 pages and more. “Unfortunately, with large documents, PDFpen can become unresponsive and even lock up in Document view. While I had no problems with PDFpen when testing with shorter documents (<50 pages), when I threw my old 300 page PhD dissertation (the only long PDF I had) into it, it repeatedly froze up with the spinning beachball of death when I selected Print and had to be Force Quit.”
My personal take: Years ago I had a training manual professionally printed. The layout was a little tricky, with pages being folded so they could be stapled, and printed double-sided. To do this, the printer had to rearrange the order of the pages using Adobe Acrobat Pro.
Pdf Expert Vs Pdfpenpro Pro
For a job that sophisticated, PDFpen wouldn’t be the best tool, especially in the hands of a professional. But when rearranging just a few pages, it will do the job quickly and simply.
Reasons Behind My Reviews and Ratings
Effectiveness: 5/5
PDFpen is able to do everything I need in a PDF editor: basic markup, making notes and comments, and basic editing. In fact, it’s able to do most things Adobe Acrobat Pro can do, but without the steep learning curve.
Price: 4.5/5
PDFpen offers similar functionality to its competitors at a much friendlier price. That’s great. But $75 is still a steep price to pay if you don’t use the app regularly. Perhaps a PDFpen Basic with a few less features for around $25 would appeal to casual users of the program.
Ease of Use: 5/5
PDF editing has a reputation of being tricky and technical. Adobe Acrobat Pro lives up to that reputation. By contrast, PDFpen makes marking up and basic editing child’s play.
Support: 4/5
The Smile website contains helpful video tutorials for PDFpen, as well as a brief FAQ and a detailed knowledge base. A comprehensive PDF user’s manual is also available. You can contact support via email or an online form, and Smile say they work hard to respond within 24 hours, and usually respond much faster. I didn’t have the need to contact support during my review.
Alternatives to PDFpen
Adobe Acrobat Pro DC: Acrobat Pro was the first app for reading and editing PDF documents, and is still one of the best options. However, it is quite expensive. An annual subscription costs $179.88. Read our full Acrobat review.
ABBYY FineReader: FineReader is a well-respected app that shares many features with PDFpen. But it, too, comes with a higher price tag. Read our review of FineReader here.
Apple Preview: The Mac’s Preview app allows you to not only view PDF documents, but mark them up as well. The Markup toolbar includes icons for sketching, drawing, adding shapes, typing text, adding signatures, and adding pop-up notes. This functionality will be expanded in High Sierra.
You can also read our best PDF editor roundup review for more options.
Conclusion
PDF is a common format for sharing user manuals, training material, official forms and academic papers. It’s the closest thing to paper that you can work with on your computer. PDFpen allows you to do even more with your collection of PDFs.
Students can study more effectively by highlighting, circling text and making notes right on their PDF class notes. Teachers and editors can mark up a PDF to show their students or writers what changes are required. Consumers can fill in PDF forms, and even add their signature to official documents.
If PDFs are a big part of your life, you need PDFpen. It includes most of the features of its competitors, but at a more affordable price. And it’s much easier to use. I recommend it.
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You can’t avoid handling PDF (Portable Document Format) files: every website and program seems to generate them, either as a preferred choice or an option. And, often, you need to make some tweak or change in a PDF or fill it out when it hasn’t been set up by its creator to have preset form elements.
If you’re working as a design professional, you probably already subscribe to or have access at work to Adobe’s Creative Cloud, which includes Adobe Acrobat pro tools. If not, you likely rely on Apple’s Preview app, which has basic PDF handling, but suffered a series of glitches in Sierra that made it hard to use with PDFs. (Those all seem to be fixed now.)
But I’ve found in my own work and in correspondence with both design pros and regular users that Acrobat is obscure and hard to master, and Preview typically insufficient.
It’s into this gap that Smile developed PDFpen ($75) and PDFpenPro ($125), which have matured for many years as an alternative. PDFpenPro is as full featured as Acrobat in nearly every respect and PDFpen just a little less so, while Smile offers each at a standalone price that’s reasonable. It’s much easier to master either app than Acrobat, and Smile has retained a consistent but routinely improved interface for the software over years, unlike Adobe’s giant shifts in approach for Acrobat that leaves long-time users like me reeling.
The macOS software is both exhaustively featured and generally intuitive. 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 Pro flavor is also a superb way to design forms, retrofit existing documents to contain form fields, and to fill out forms. 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.
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. 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.
The Pro version differs from the regular by adding to its features some options that are critical to niche audiences, including Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and PDF/A output and table of contents and form creation and editing.
Pdf Expert Vs Pdfpenpro 2017
(In this review, I’ll refer to both apps’ core functionality as PDFpen, calling out features that require PDFpenPro.)
What’s new in version 9
For those who already use or know PDFpen, let me jump to the chase about new features in version 9. Smile has focused on improving annotations used to comment on a PDF, export formats and controls, and table of contents support (Pro version only)
Annotations let you mark up a PDF and share the results without modifying the underlying PDF. It’s one of PDFpen’s strongest features, offering easily accessible, multiple tools for highlighting, adding comments, striking through text, and the like.
However, in previous versions, it was slightly harder to work with these annotations. Version 9 makes it possible to select multiple annotations at once, copy the text, delete them, and show highlights in the Annotations sidebar view. 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.
For those who require a table of contents (TOC) or need to work with one created elsewhere, Acrobat has been your best choice until now. PDFpenPro allows substantially more advanced TOC options for more sophisticated and less clunky interaction. It also now merges TOC entries when combining 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. 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. It also allows a range of image resolution (really density measured in dots per inch) in making the conversion.
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).
The rest of PDFpen
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. 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.
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. 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. 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 select text to copy it out, or use a Correct Text feature to edit it. PDFpen’s one drawback relative to Acrobat is how it handles dropping in revised text. Acrobat can read embedded fonts, even ones that are subsetted (including only the characters used in the document), and your “touch ups” appear in the native font whenever possible. This preserves the appearance. PDFpen drops in a default font, which makes it impossible to use to make an aesthetically usable seamless fix. You can adjust this by selecting fonts installed in OS X, but it’s not nearly as useful. In one document I tested, PDFpen splayed the edited text all over the page in different fonts; Acrobat handled editing the same text just fine.
Both versions let you fill out form fields created in other software. If you need to make your own forms, the Pro versions can autogenerate form fields, or you can drop them in manually and format their appearance. Autogeneration is quite amazing: I threw scanned images—not just PDFs—at PDFpenPro that had continuous lines with labels underneath for first, middle, and last name, and other similar entries, and it correctly broke those into separate fields. Pro can even embed a button into a PDF that allows someone filling it out to submit the form data or the filled-out PDF to a Web server or send either via email.
I regularly use PDFpen to convert the text of scanned documents or images using its built-in OCR engine from OmniPage. The software prompts you when you open a document that has images that could be analyzed, although you can disable that prompt. (Here’s a tip: The *Edit > OCR* option is often dimmed when the app doesn’t think there’s text to recognize; hold down Command and Option and select the Edit menu, and you can force OCR.)
The OCR software is highly accurate, even for extremely degraded text. I tried it on old newspaper pages with very small type, and it did remarkably well. On typewritten or computer output, it’s nearly perfect in my testing. Once converted, you can search on the document or display the text in an isolated layer. The Pro version lets you correct the text, too.
Version 8 added digital signatures, verifying cryptographically that a document is unchanged since the creator locked it. PDFpen shows that a PDF is signed by displaying a triangular notch in the upper-right corner. If the triangle is green and has a checkmark, the app has verified it; clicking the corner brings up additional technical details.
I found it wonky to sign in PDFpen in version 8, and it remains so in version 9. You have to select *Tools > Signature Field*, click on a document, draw a signature (or at least click in a drawing field), and then click *Apply Digital Signature*, at which point you can select an existing certificate or generate a self-signed one.
PDFpen can make use of measurement, a feature that’s part of the PDF spec, but is typically incorporated only when architectural and other computer-aided design (CAD) software exports a PDF. With a PDF that embeds scale and units, the measuring tool displays those accordingly. But you can also use it with any PDF, where PDFpen uses the document’s explicit measurements (like 8.5 by 11 inches) as the basis of dimensions that you can opt to show in points, inches, or millimeters. The measurements can only be made one at a time, can’t be stored, and can’t be edited—only dragged from a starting to ending place, making them somewhat less useful than they could be.
PDFs can support file attachments and annotations, and PDFpen lets a PDF act as a kind of portmanteau or a sticky-note festooned marked-up copy. PDFpen can extract file attachments and annotations, and also preview them. The basic PDFpen is more of a viewer while the Pro edition can add and delete attachments and annotations. Both versions also let you record audio annotations you can add to a PDF as well as play them back.
Version 8 added local export of text and graphics as a Word file (both versions) or Excel (Pro only), where previous releases sent the PDF to Smile’s servers for processing. I exported a complicated PDF that included a very detailed table and the resulting version in Word was almost pixel perfect and fully editable. The same PDF exported to Excel in the Pro release with equally well preserved tabular detail, including merging and spanning cells. Even a PDF with little tabular data and images exported to Excel just fine.
The server round-trip is still required in version 9 for PowerPoint and PDF/A (an archived format of PDF). This is a security risk, as your files wind up being exposed to Smile—regardless of how trustworthy they are and how well secured their systems are—and also requires being online.
Crashing bugs
Unfortunately, during my testing of the 9.0.1 release, I experienced several crashes when performing routine tasks, some of which were “destructive,” losing changes I had made since the previous save. This happened while trying to choose annotation options in the Print dialog, while printing annotations, and while adding a digital signature field to a page.
Some of the crashes seemed to occur on one pass, but after relaunching and attempting the same task, it worked without a hitch. I expect that Smile will fix whatever bugs have led to these crashes, of course, and I’ve reported them all to the company.
However, more generally, my expectation with software in 2017 that manipulates documents is that they will use some form of journaling or continuous save, much as we see in Pages, BBEdit, InDesign, and other business and professional software. With those apps, even a system crash often loses no more than the last keystroke after launching the app, as it can recover the intermediate changes.
This reduces my score for the app overall, and it’s an area I hope Smile puts effort into in the future, given the broad support for intermediate continuous saving in other apps.
Pricing
Smile sells single-user licenses for $75 and $125 for the regular and Pro versions, respectively, whether directly through the company site or through the Mac App Store. The MAS doesn’t support upgrades or family and multi-user business licenses, which can be purchased directly.
Smile charges $30 for upgrades to either version, and $50 to move from PDFpen to PDFpenPro 9. Those who bought a previous version via the MAS should leave that copy installed on their Mac, and then download version 9 directly from Smile’s site. On launch, the Smile version will identify the previous MAS copy and offer upgrade pricing.
Bottom line
Long-time users may sit this upgrade out if the list of new features isn’t compelling, although the $30 upgrade price isn’t hard to justify. New users will see very little light in the gap between Acrobat and PDFpenPro or even the regular PDFpen edition.
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