It remains true that the Preview app you get in OS X is an excellent PDF reader and that you can do a lot with it. However, to do more, you need tools and we keep recommending
PDFpen from Smile Software. Maybe this tells you a lot about the things we like doing with PDFs but if there were one feature that sold PDFpen to us, it was this: the ability to change text. If you know you can do this then you know it's useful but if you don't then you may not have quite got this yet: when someone sends you a document in PDF specifically so that you can only read it, you can edit it anyway. Use your new powers only for good.
But if you choose not to, rewrite that contract, change that spelling, correct that address and then watch their faces when you send them back the revised PDF. That would impress us but what really makes you blink is when your newly changed text is in exactly the same font, indistinguishable from the text you were originally sent.
This may even be the simplest thing you can do in PDFpen but it's still not very obvious and there are limitations so here's how to do it and what to watch out for. We used PDFpen Pro 7 on OS X Yosemite for this but text editing has long been a staple of PDFpen in both its editions.
Look, nothing up the sleeves
Here's a typical book contract in PDF format. Back in the olden days, we'd have just signed this but now we can go crazy and clarify bits that we don't agree with.
Highlight a word, sentence or paragraph and then choose Format/Correct text.
That's it. We could shut up now. The highlighted text becomes editable and you type away just like you do any word processor document.
That's better
Here's that contract with the Royalties heading gleefully clarified. You cannot tell that this wasn't always in the PDF: it is perfect.
That's not guaranteed, though. In our testing, PDFpen was best at short sections of text like single lines or even single words. If we take an entire paragraph from this contract, for instance, we can start editing it but run into formatting problems: the indent moves back and new text we typed didn't wrap around.
Doubtlessly if we played around enough we could fudge it but there comes a point when you do need to pick up the phone and have a chat with the author of the PDF or the publisher imposing these draconian conditions on the contract.
That said, it is common to find whole chunks of a document that either you want to remove because you object to them or that you have to remove for legal and confidentiality reasons.
PDFpen comes with two ways of doing that: a good and a better one – otherwise known as the black or the white ones.
Blackout and whiteout
Select any word, sentence or block of text and choose Format / Redact Erase – Block. The text you've highlighted is replaced by that kind of Top Secret Government black banding.
Alternatively, choose Format / Redact Text – Erase and it may look as if nothing has happened. Close the PDF and open it in Preview or any other app, though, and you'll see your contract with a great big blank space where that redacted text is.
Come on, how often will you do this?
You're probably not going to go changing and redacting text in other people's PDFs every single day. However, you may well be creating PDFs every day and PDFpen is really more for making them than it is for making these small adjustments.
If you've never read a PDF in your life, you won't get any value out of PDFpen but when Preview isn't enough for you, PDFpen and PDFpen Pro are.
-William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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