PDFpen Adobe Acrobat pro now has a serious rival that’s also cheaper
Works well with split View, with real-time updates and effective navigation
£68.95 FrOM smile software, smilesoftware.com needs Os X 10.7 or later
While every Mac can make simple PDFs, editing and interacting with complex PDF documents can be an expensive exercise. Adobe’s Acrobat Pro DC is £15.17 a month; if you’re working in an environment that subscribes to Adobe’s Creative Cloud, you’ll have Acrobat already, but if not give the PDFpen trial period a go.
At £68.95 it’s packed with powerful editing features. It can extract and edit text, digitally sign documents, adjust images, scan and OCR documents, and redact sensitive information. There’s also a Pro version at £99.95 that adds form creation, website conversion, Portfolio document creation, and the ability to correct typos in the OCR text layer. PDFpen Pro can also use OCR on horizontal Chinese, Japanese, and Korean documents.
The latest standard version brings some welcome improvements. Split View enables
you to work with multiple bits of the same document at the same time. It works really well, with real-time updates and effective navigation: click in the thumbnail or table of contents to navigate in the main panel, and å-click to do the same in the second panel.
Font Bar
The new Font Bar makes it easy to see and edit the fonts in a document, and you can now edit form element properties for multiple fields at the same time. Page numbering has been improved with new customisation options, you can now add multiple items to your library at once, and the sidebar has been given a freshen up.
PDFpen now supports iOS 12’s Continuity Camera, which enables you to use your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad camera (running iOS 12 or later) as a document scanner. Unfortunately, Continuity Camera is flaky and simply wouldn’t work for us.
It also now has dictionaries for general English, legal and medical applications, and recognition is fast and accurate.
There’s a lot here to like, but we have a few niggles: the interface is a little drab, there’s a bit of a learning curve, and you’ll need to customise the toolbars to get rid of the wasted free space. But then we have moans about Acrobat too. PDFpen is a powerful and more affordable alternative.