- #SMILE PDFPEN REVIEW HOW TO#
- #SMILE PDFPEN REVIEW PDF#
- #SMILE PDFPEN REVIEW FULL#
- #SMILE PDFPEN REVIEW PRO#
- #SMILE PDFPEN REVIEW SOFTWARE#
One rough spot in PDFpen is its difficulty in allowing “touch-up” editing in the same font, which lead in this example to a type explosion of sorts. This toolset is also useful when you’re given a PDF, instead of generating it yourself, or when you’re working through revisions on a document that you’re handing back and forth among a team. You can also delete objects, or redact parts of a document-this is true redaction, where the underlying data is removed, rather than just a black bar being overlaid.
#SMILE PDFPEN REVIEW PDF#
Like Acrobat, PDFpen is a rich PDF editor, letting you work with text, images, attachments, and annotations, and edit anything that appears on a page, including all of those elements. That’s partly because Smile chose to use a straightforward toolbar (introduced a few versions back) mirrored in a Tools menu to spell it all out.
#SMILE PDFPEN REVIEW HOW TO#
PDFpen has seemingly nearly as many features and options as Adobe Acrobat, but I consistently find myself able to figure out how to accomplish what I want in PDFpen, while I often have to consult web documentation and poke around in Acrobat to get to where I’m going. Most of the remaining version 9 changes are fiddly things everyone will appreciate (like showing resizing handles for items that are off the edge of the page), or for which people with specific needs will suddenly breathe a sigh of relief (such as horizontal OCR for ideographic languages, like Chinese, in PDFpenPro). It also allows a range of image resolution (really density measured in dots per inch) in making the conversion.
This latest version does a bit more, adding a host of image formats and options that include 1-bit TIFF (black-and-white), grayscale export, and JPEG and PNG files. While Preview and Acrobat have had relatively robust ways to export pages from PDF into other formats, it’s one area that PDFpen has lagged in. (In this review, I’ll refer to both apps’ core functionality as PDFpen, calling out features that require PDFpenPro.)
#SMILE PDFPEN REVIEW PRO#
The Pro version differs from the regular by adding to its features some options that are critical to niche audiences, including Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and PDF/A output and table of contents and form creation and editing.
#SMILE PDFPEN REVIEW FULL#
Version 9 isn’t nearly as big an upgrade, but it’s packed full of enhancements and additions, notably a large variety of image export options and better annotation management, useful when marking up a PDF. Version 8 of both apps added many elements found in Acrobat that were still missing in PDFpen, like digital-signature management and validation, and new kinds of export methods from PDF to other formats, including Word. There’s a slight awkwardness in picking, setting values for, and switching among the app’s several tools, but it’s minor compared to its utility and ease of use once you’re using a tool. The Pro flavor is also a superb way to design forms, retrofit existing documents to contain form fields, and to fill out forms. Both editions can create and edit the contents of PDFs, allow drawing and adding text on top of files, and include excellent optical character recognition (OCR) software.
#SMILE PDFPEN REVIEW SOFTWARE#
The macOS software is both exhaustively featured and generally intuitive. You can easily fix failed recognition, too. Powerful OCR works even with rough original, like this example from 1917. It’s much easier to master either app than Acrobat, and Smile has retained a consistent but routinely improved interface for the software over years, unlike Adobe’s giant shifts in approach for Acrobat that leaves long-time users like me reeling. PDFpenPro is as full featured as Acrobat in nearly every respect and PDFpen just a little less so, while Smile offers each at a standalone price that’s reasonable. It’s into this gap that Smile developed PDFpen ($75) and PDFpenPro ($125), which have matured for many years as an alternative. (Those all seem to be fixed now.)īut I’ve found in my own work and in correspondence with both design pros and regular users that Acrobat is obscure and hard to master, and Preview typically insufficient.
If not, you likely rely on Apple’s Preview app, which has basic PDF handling, but suffered a series of glitches in Sierra that made it hard to use with PDFs. If you’re working as a design professional, you probably already subscribe to or have access at work to Adobe’s Creative Cloud, which includes Adobe Acrobat pro tools. And, often, you need to make some tweak or change in a PDF or fill it out when it hasn’t been set up by its creator to have preset form elements. You can’t avoid handling PDF (Portable Document Format) files: every website and program seems to generate them, either as a preferred choice or an option.
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