PDFpenPro recognizes complex field arrangements when automatically creating fill-in forms. 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. 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. 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. 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.īoth versions let you fill out form fields created in other software. You can adjust this by selecting fonts installed in OS X, but it’s not nearly as useful. PDFpen drops in a default font, which makes it impossible to use to make an aesthetically usable seamless fix. 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. PDFpen’s one drawback relative to Acrobat is how it handles dropping in revised text. You can select text to copy it out, or use a Correct Text feature to edit it. One rough spot in PDFpen is its difficulty in allowing “touch-up” editing in the same font, which lead in this example to a type explosion of sorts. 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. (In this review, I’ll refer to both apps’ core functionality as PDFpen, calling out features that require PDFpenPro.) 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. 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. 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.
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