PDFPen: Turning Your PDFs In To Paper

Apple has always been very generous to us by giving us a great, free PDF viewer. Although, sometimes that is just not enough. Sometimes we need features like annotation, forms and shapes. Sure, there's Adobe Acrobat but that's extremely pricy if you just want a few more features than Preview. Well, there's another choice: SmileOnMyMac's PDFPen.

Think about a piece of paper with text on it. You can draw on it, annotate it and white out text. This is exactly what PDFPen lets you do to PDFs. It turns a PDF into a piece of paper. However, that's not all it does. It has many other great features; one of which is OCR.

OCR (optical character recognition) is a technology used to read text. When you scan a piece of paper onto your computer, even if you scan to a PDF, it is really just an image. OCR lets you turn that image into a PDF with real text. This makes it searchable and editable. To OCR a document in PDFPen, just go to Edit>OCR… You really won't need to even go to that menu to do it, because when you open up a PDF that's just an image, PDFPen will ask you if you want it to OCR the document, the page, or not OCR at all. If your PDF is a little skewed (you may have scanned it that way) then I suggest that you don't OCR it, because the text will come out very weird. I have yet to find a PDF de-skewing/rotating program, so your best choice is just to rescan the document. Having rotating in small increments built into PDFPen might be a very nice feature. I have also noticed that about 50% of the time, PDFPen will crash while doing OCR, so hopefully they make the OCR a little more slow-computer-friendly (although my machine passes their minimum requirements for OCR).

As said above, PDFPen turns a PDF into a piece of paper (metaphorically of course). Well, I’m going to tell you about a few tools that it has for this purpose. The first is the Text Tool. This is the second-leftmost toolbar button in the set of four buttons. If you select it, you can just drag a text box onto your PDF. Then, you can edit it, and that text will become part of the PDF (when looked at with other PDF tools). Another one of these tools is the Scribble Tool. This is the second-to-rightmost toolbar button in the set of four buttons. With this, you can draw  (i.e. with a tablet) onto your PDF. What is drawn will appear as an object on your PDF (it will have a bounding box, etc), and it will appear as an image in other programs. The last of these tools is the Image Tool. This is exactly what it sounds like; it lets you add images to your PDFs. To use it, either drag an image onto your PDF or select the toolbar button (the rightmost toolbar button on the toolbar). This image can then be moved and rotated to your liking.

There is another set of tools in PDFPen that can be used to markup and annotate text. The first kind is the Highlighting Tool. All you have to do is select some text, and click-and-hold on the down arrow on the Highlight toolbar item. You can then choose the color of the highlighter, or the type of markup you want. Then, there is the Note Tool. With this, you can add a little note icon by some text, and when double-clicked, it will display a note. To add one to your PDF, just go to Tools>Note Tool. Then, just click on your PDF, and the icon will appear. You can then move this to where you want it, and double-click to add text. However, if you want to be able to have this not associated with either a word, or a few words, you can place it close by, but there is not a way to associate it.

The last major set of tools I will talk about are what make PDFPen what it is. These are the tools that allow you to edit text and images already on the PDF! If you created a PDF, and you realized that you misspelled one word, you don’t want to have to re-export it, so you can simply edit the text. To do this, select the text that you would like to edit and click on the Correct Text toolbar icon (it may take a second based on how much text you selected). Then, all you must do is enter the new text, and it has been changed! If you want to edit an image, just click-and-hold on the leftmost toolbar icon in the set of four icons, and select the cursor item. Then, just click on an image, and you can move and resize it! However! This does not work for all images! It only works on PDFs that were rendered in PDFPen! I have also found that much of the time, you lose formatting with the text that you are editing.

PDFPen, by SmileOnMyMac, retails for only $49.95 and there is a Pro version for only $99.95. The pro version has two extra features: multi-platform form creation, and index sheet creation. You can download a free trial of both from their Web site too. If you compare these prices to something like Acrobat, you will see how great of a deal they are, not to mention how much more Mac-like they are and how great their support is. If you work with PDFs at least a few times a month, I highly suggest you give this a try, and tell us what you think.

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