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Mac PDF Editor: Preview. Posted January 14, 2016 by Tim Allard. For OSX Users: Blueprints Printing recommends using Apple’s built in application “Preview” to merge your PDF’s before uploading. PDF Editing Open your PDF in PDFelement by either using the drag-and-drop function or clicking on the Open button in the start-up window. You can also go to 'File > Open > Browse'. To edit your PDF document, simply click on 'Edit' on the menu tab.
PDFelement 6 is a PDF editor for Mac that provides various features to handle pdf documents from simple text editing to merging pdfs with vast sharing options such as Dropbox. PDF 6element for Mac gives you the robust functionality that will digitize your enterprise at a go. View and edit PDF metadata; Add and edit hyperlinks in a PDF file; Where It Excels. Preview is fast. Mac OS X isn't exactly known for its speed and efficiency, so Preview's ability to blow through.
Readdle’s PDF Expert ($60 on the App Store) is a fast, slick document viewer with annotation tools that gives Apple’s Preview a run for its money.
Acrobat who?
With the release of PDF Expert 2, Readdle not only delivers PDF editing, but it also comes surprisingly close to feature parity with the reigning PDF heavyweight, Adobe Acrobat DC. Want to add links or redact text inside a PDF document? No problem. Need to keep PDF files from potentially prying eyes by protecting documents with a password? Consider it done.
By far the most impressive new features are the ability to edit text and images. Whether fixing a last-minute typo or swapping out a company logo, PE2’s slick user interface makes it a snap, although the tools are fairly basic. I successfully replaced one image from a magazine article, but couldn’t match the 20-degree angle of the original; the rotate tools only work 45 degrees at a time.
Readdle managed to add this functionality and still run circles around the performance of Preview, which has always been notoriously slow to launch or open files. By comparison, PDF Expert 2 is greased lightning. It’s so fast, I’ve made it my default application for all PDF files.
When it comes to advanced features, Acrobat still has the upper hand for now. Power users who need optical character recognition or frequently convert between PDF and text files like Microsoft Word will find PE2 lacking; tools to optimize scanned pages or reduce the size of PDF files are also absent.
Effortless transfer
Editing may be the star of PDF Expert 2, but there are welcome improvements to the existing annotation lineup as well. The biggest is Stamps, which allow users to markup documents using virtual imprints; a wide variety are included, but you can also create your own. The crop tool also comes in handy, offering the option to trim just the current page, or an entire document at once.
Readdle addressed my second-biggest complaint about the previous version by enabling users to import images to use as a signature, in addition to existing keyboard and trackpad methods. You can even use Apple Pencil to create a new signature on iPad Pro, which syncs back to the Mac as well.
Speaking of working together, PE2 supports Handoff, but the built-in Readdle Transfer provides a better way to transfer files between devices. (It’s the only option for those who purchase outside of the Mac App Store.) Open a document on the iOS version while PDF Expert is running, and a little blue icon lights up on the toolbar next to the Share button. Use the pulldown menu to select the document, and it instantly opens on the Mac. This feature also works the other way around, and more reliably than Handoff.
While PDF Expert 2 is more affordable than competitors like Adobe Acrobat DC or PDFpen, the price also increased accordingly; owners of the first version (originally $20) receive the update free of charge. Based on Readdle’s track record, I’m confident the third chapter in the PDF Expert saga will check off most of the remaining items on my wish list.
Bottom line
Faster than Preview and nearly as feature-packed as Adobe Acrobat DC, PDF Expert 2 is proof sequels can be superior to the original in every way.
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PDFs offer a lot of advantages over other file types, but being easy to work with generally isn’t one of them. What makes working with PDFs difficult is that they look familiar, but because PDFs are essentially images, they are much more restrictive. This can make editing them extremely aggravating when you know exactly what change you want to make, but your software won’t cooperate.
Fortunately, there are a couple of great tools available for the Mac that make working PDFs a much more pleasant experience. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the best options available and crown our favorite: PDFpen.
Evaluation CriteriaOnline Pdf Editor For Mac
In selecting the best PDF editor for Mac, we used the following criteria in selecting the winner:
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Our Favorite PDF Editor: PDFpen
Smile’s PDFpen application is a functional, powerful PDF editor. While the user interface isn’t the best of the apps we tested, it’s generally easy to use and makes up for a lack of polish with powerful features to meet even the most rigorous demands of PDF power users.
There are lots of workflows that are possible in PDFpen, but we’ve looked at some common ones to show the power and flexibility packed into this program.
Annotations
Annotations in PDFpen are fairly straightforward. To highlight text in your PDF, just select Highlight from the tool bar, pick your color, then select the text you want to highlight.
To add a note or comment to your PDF, select the appropriate options from the Tools menu. Notes can be minimized and display a text bubble icon in the document that you can click to expand, and comments are displayed as text on top of the page.
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You can also add shapes to your PDF document if you want. To do this, select the Shapes icon from the toolbar, select the type of shape you want, and then drag it into your document. Once you have your shape, you can easily select a new color, line format, or line thickness from the toolbar.
PDFpen also has a library of proofreading marks you can use to mark up your document. To access these, go to Window → Library and click the Proofreading Marks icon.
When you’re done annotating your document and you want to print it, you can click Show Details from the Print menu to select whether you want to include comments, notes, or both.
Signing Documents
Signing PDF documents is another common editing task. 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 do this, you first need to sign your name and scan it to your Mac. Once you have the file, you can drag it into PDFpen, but you’ll see that the image file will have a background that obstructs whatever the signature is sitting on top of (usually it’s white). You can make the background transparent by going to Edit → Make Transparent Image. This will open a popup with an eyedropper tool where you can select the background color that you want to make transparent.
Once you select the background color and click Make Transparent, you’ll have a signature that you can drag to the appropriate place in the document and resize by dragging one of the corners.
Once you have your signature ready, you can save it for re-use. You can do this by going to Window → Library to make sure the Library window is open, then go to the Library window and select the + icon, and click Add Selected Imprint to save the transparent signature image to your Library.
Applying OCR
Optical Character Recognition is extremely important when dealing with PDF files as it allows the computer to identify the text contents of your document. Without it, all it sees is a bunch of pixels, which means you can’t do anything that involves text selection (i.e. copy & paste) and you won’t be able to search your document and find a selected word or phrase.
This is one area PDFpen really shines as it is incredibly easy to apply OCR to a document. In fact, when you open a PDF file in PDFpen that it thinks is scanned, a dialog box will appear and ask you if you’d like to apply OCR to a particular page or to the entire document. You can even select from multiple languages.
Redacting Text Easiest video editor for mac and windows free.
Occasionally you’ll need to share PDF documents that contain text you don’t want others to be able to see (like address, telephone number, etc.). PDFpen has you covered there too, as it allows you to find and redact text to hide personal or sensitive information.
To redact text in PDFpen, first click the Find button in the toolbar and type in the text you want to redact. You’ll see all the instances of that text appearing in the document in the box below your search term. Next, click Find in the dropdown menu and select Redact.
Finally, select the instance you want to redact from the list and click Redact. If you want to redact all instances of the text, you can also click Redact All to redact them all at once.
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Exporting to Microsoft Word (or other word processors)
Let’s say you get a contract from someone that you want to edit. Frequently these documents are sent as PDF files specifically because it makes it harder to make changes, but PDFpen’s export to Microsoft Word feature makes this easy as well. All you have to do is click File → Export and select the desired file format.
This will allow you to easily edit the text in the document and you can then export back to PDF by clicking File → Print and selecting Save as PDF.
Additional Features
If your PDF needs extend beyond the scope of the standard PDFpen application, you can also check out PDFpen Pro, which includes the following additional features:
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PDFpen is availabe for $75 on the Smile software website, and PDFpen Pro is $125 if you need the additional features.
Runner Up: PDF Expert
PDF Expert by Readdle Software is an excellent application with one major flaw: It doesn’t have the ability to add OCR to your PDF files. This is absolutely critical when editing PDF files, so the lack of this single feature is unfortunately a dealbreaker for a lot of people.
For a lot of PDF-based tasks, PDF Expert is fine. It offers a blazing fast PDF reading experience, and has very good annotation tools. It also offers the tools to edit, merge, and sign documents as well as fill forms. Once you’re done editing your PDF file, PDF Expert integrates fully with the Mac share sheet so you can send it to any application that accepts PDFs. It does all of this with a beautiful user interface and a price tag ($59.99) that is on par with the other PDF editors we looked at. If you’re a student, you can even snag a small education discount when purchasing directly from Readdle.
Other Options
Free Mac Pdf Editor SoftwareConclusion
If you’re looking to edit PDFs on your Mac, quality options are hard to come by, and PDFpen is the cream of the (very limited) crop. PDFpen offers enough features to complete just about any standard PDF editing task quickly and easily, and offers a Pro version for those who need the extra features. If you don’t work with PDFs regularly or don’t need all the bells and whistles that PDFpen offers, PDF Expert offers a great user interface for basic edits and is probably powerful enough for most people at a much lower price point.
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