These days, an ever-increasing amount of “paper” — contracts, tax forms, bills, reports, and more — comes into our lives as PDF files. We generate this virtual paper too, since it’s so much easier to save a document as a PDF and send it to a colleague via email than it is to print and send via fax or mail. To read, edit, and manipulate all these PDFs, you need appropriate tools and skills.
Given the high price of Adobe Acrobat DC Pro, many Mac users have turned to Smile’s affordable PDFpen apps to help them sign PDF forms, handle scanned documents, make changes in existing PDFs, create new PDFs from a variety of sources, and even export PDFs to other file formats. With Take Control of PDFpen 8, you’ll learn how to do all these tasks and more on your Mac with PDFpen or PDFpenPro or on the go with PDFpen for iPad & iPhone.
TidBITS members can save 20% on all Smile products purchased through the Smile cart, including PDFpen 8 and PDFpenPro 8. 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.
Take Control of PDFpen 8 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 the basics out of the way, highlights of what you’ll learn to do include:
- Add and remove pages, and combine pages from multiple files into one PDF.
- Mark up a PDF with highlights, comments, 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 with OCRed text in the OCR layer (PDFpenPro only)
- Add clickable links, page numbers, and images.
- Make a clickable table of contents (PDFpenPro only).
- 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 PDF forms:
- Fill out forms with ease.
- Add a handwritten signature.
- Apply a digital signing certificate.
- Print just form entries on a pre-printed form.
- Create an interactive PDF form (PDFpenPro only) that can collect data and send it to you via email or the Web. You can add an interactive signature field, which makes it easy for the form to be signed online.
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.
