PDF serves as a universal document format for all manner of forms, statements, and receipts. And, whether you’ve moved a lot of your documents into the cloud or not, you’ve probably noticed that more and more paper is coming your way as PDF files.
But, even as PDFs unstuff our filing cabinets and shrink the piles in our physical inboxes, we need to learn new skills to edit and manage PDFs effectively. Many Mac users have turned to Smile’s affordable PDFpen app to help them sign PDF forms, handle scanned documents, edit PDFs, create PDFs, and even export PDFs to other file formats. With Take Control of PDFpen 7, you’ll learn how to do all these tasks and more on a Mac with PDFpen or PDFpenPro, or on the go with PDFpen for iPad & iPhone.
Save 20% Members of Take Control’s sister publication, TidBITS, can save 20% on all Smile products purchased through the Smile cart. To learn more, visit the Membership Benefits page. To access the coupon code, make sure you’ve logged in and click through from the Your Member Benefits page.
The book begins with a guide to purchasing options: PDFpen versus PDFpenPro, from Smile versus the Mac App Store, and the advantages of the iOS version. Next, you’ll meet PDFpen with an overview of the PDF format and a tour of the interface.
With those preliminaries out of the way, you’ll learn how to:
- Add and remove pages, and combine pages from multiple files into one PDF.
- Mark up a PDF with highlights, comments, professional editing marks, and more.
- Edit a PDF by fixing typos, adding text, formatting text, and redacting confidential text.
- Scan a document into a PDF, and make the text editable with OCR.
- View and work directly with OCRed text in the OCR layer (PDFpenPro only)
- Add clickable links, page numbers, and images.
- Make a clickable table of contents (PDFpenPro only).
- Reduce the file size with a Quartz filter.
- Password-protect a PDF. And (PDFpenPro only), prevent others from printing or editing a PDF.
- Turn a PDF into a formatted Microsoft Word document, or (PDFpenPro only) export it in Excel or PowerPoint format.
And, you’ll find directions for working with forms:
- Fill out forms with ease.
- Add a handwritten signature — in the iOS versions, you can write with a stylus!
- Print just form entries on a pre-printed form.
- Create an interactive PDF form for both Mac and Windows (PDFpenPro only) that can collect data and send it to you via email or the Web.
That’s not all! The book also covers how to:
- Work with PDFs in PDFpen for iPad & iPhone.
- Get your PDFs into and out of PDFpen in iOS via iCloud Drive, iTunes, Dropbox, and Open In.
- Print a PDF with its annotations appearing at the end.
- Store frequently used items (like a logo or signature) in the PDFpen Library.
- Turn a Web site into a multi-page PDF (PDFpenPro only).
An appendix describes the useful AppleScripts that ship with PDFpen.
This ebook was created in collaboration with Smile, with PDFpen’s developers tech editing the book.
About Michael E. Cohen
Michael E. Cohen has taught English composition, worked as a programmer for NASA’s Deep Space Network, helped develop the first commercial ebooks at the Voyager Company, and co-founded a major university’s Humanities computing center. He has authored several books, including Apple Interface Mysteries, Take Control of PDFpen, Take Control of Pages, and Take Control of TextExpander.
