My thanks to the fine folks at Smile Software (makers of TextExpander), for sponsoring the RSS feed this week to promote PDFpen.
PDFpen is a professional-grade PDF editing tool that is easy and affordable for even the non-professional. With it you can edit text, insert images, annotate documents, and much, much more.
You can highlight text, strike it through, post your own comments, and more. This type of functionality is extremely helpful for marking up a PDF proof of a design mockup.
PDFpen lets you edit text that is embedded within the PDF file itself. Allowing you to make corrections or edits when only small parts of a PDF file need changing.
And, taking text editing to an even higher level, PDFpen has a search and replace feature. Just like you would use in a word processing program, but you can search for and replace words within the PDF. Additionally, you can search and redact. Very clever if there is a certain name, number, location, or whatever littered throughout a document in which you want all instances of it to be blocked out.
Moreover, PDFpen has fantastic OCR capabilities. If you’re wanting to create a paperless office, then PDFpen is one of the best of the bunch. When you open a photo or scanned image that has text, then a dropdown menu appears, asking if you want to OCR the whole document or just a certain page. (PDFpen recognizes 12 different languages for its OCR.)
Marco Arment, when on the hunt for a good OCR app, tried several and concluded that PDFpen was the best of the lot. Stating that with PDFpen, the image quality was maintained perfectly (many OCR apps will degrade the image quality of the documents they scan), it had very few OCR errors, and that it can even be automated with AppleScript.
In short, PDFpen is a smart and well-designed app. It’s built by the folks at Smile who have a fantastic reputation — they’re some of the good guys.
You can download a free trial of PDFpen from the Smile website, or buy it for $59.95. It’s also available on the Mac App Store.