Optical character recognition turns that image into searchable text, making it a much more valuable resource. But unless the scan is OCRed, it’s just a static, unsearchable photo of a piece of paper. PDF is arguably the best format to use when scanning paper documents onto your computer. 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. Marking up a document can be useful for your own reference, or when collaborating on a PDF with others. My personal take: PDFs don’t have to be read-only documents. As I tested this in other PDF documents, it didn’t seem to be a problem unless an unusual font was used. While not a major problem, this heading will look a little different to the others. The location of the text was also a little different, but easy to move. Notice that the font used for the new text is very close, but not identical, to the original font. In the following screenshots, you see me change “Canadian Compliance Statement” into “Australian Compliance Statement”. To edit the text of a PDF, first select the text you want to modify or add to, then click the Correct Text button. Highlighting, drawing and making notes is done with the mouse and the use of the appropriate buttons on the toolbar. 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. 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 highlight text and draw circles around paragraphs can be of great help to students when studying, and teachers when grading papers. 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. PDFpen is a PDF editor allowing you to edit anything that appears on a PDF page, including text, images, attachments and annotations. In each subsection, I’ll first explore what the app offers and then share my personal take. 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. Here’s how it looks: Detailed Review of PDFpen I also activated the full version with an NFR license provided by Smile.

Curious to see how it stacks up, I downloaded the demo. I have heard good reviews about PDFpen, but have never tried it until now. 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.Īll of that was done using a variety of apps and scanners. My birth certificate and other important documents have all been scanned as PDFs.

I have collected, purchased, and created a large number of training courses over the years, and most of them are PDFs. I have a large collection of eBooks in PDF format. And that doesn’t account for the many more I have stored in Evernote, Google Drive, and elsewhere. In fact, Finder just found 1,926 PDF documents on my hard drive. I’ve been using computers since 1988, and Macs full-time since 2009, and over those years PDFs have become increasingly important to me.

What I Don’t Like: Edited text does not always use the right font. What I Like: Includes all of the PDF markup and editing features I need. But if your editing needs are more advanced, PDFpen and PDFpenPro will give you the best bang for your buck. If that’s all you need, you won’t need to purchase additional software. You already have a basic PDF editor on your Mac – Apple’s Preview app does basic PDF markup, including adding signatures. A pro version is available with more advanced features. PDFpen will even convert a PDF to Microsoft Word’s DOCX format for easy editing. It’s like PDFpen gives you a superpower that used to be the domain of experts. We often think of PDFs as read-only documents. You can even create searchable PDFs from paper documents. You can fill in forms and add a signature. You can add or edit the text of a document. You can mark up PDFs with highlights, drawings and comments. PDFpen (now Nitro PDF Pro) is an easy-to-use yet powerful PDF editor for Mac.

Pdfpen pro 9 vs. 8