Editing PDFs on a budget

QI need to lightly edit and extract data from some PDF files. Do I have to buy an expensive app for that?

APreview provides a basic set of tools to annotate PDF documents and copy their contents. If you want to change the contents of a document, you can either convert it to an editable format, such as a Word document, edit it, then save it back to PDF, or use a sophisticated and costly editor.

Many apps can extract the contents of a document and convert them to other formats, but in doing so you’ll inevitably lose much of the formatting, and the end result will have different layout and pagination. Such tools are of variable quality, and many are quite cheap from the Mac App Store.

Good editors are less common. Examples include PDF Expert, PDFpen (and its Pro version), and Acrobat Pro. They’ll save you a lot of time fiddling around trying to get format and layout to match, but cost more than £50.