PDFpen Pro 4.0.4 — Split, combine, re-order Edit? PDF documents

Reviewed by Harry {doc} Babad © 2009

SmileOnMyMac [SOMM] http://www.smileonmymac.com/PDFpen/index.html Release Date: 04 Jan 2009 Cost: $50, Pro Version $100 USD System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or later; Universal binary Languages: English, Japanese, German, Italian, and French; Italian soon.

Strengths: Easily fill out PDF forms and edit PDFs. Split, combine, reorder, sign and augment PDFs with text, image overlays & watermarks. Recipe editing was three times faster than with Acrobat.   Weaknesses: I had to unlearn all the moves that I mastered with Acrobat, and I needed to develop a few workarounds for functions not yet a part of PDFPen such as directly printing to a JPG for article illustration purposes.   Product Demo: http://www.smileonmymac.com/PDFpen/download.html Copyright Notice: Product and company names and logos in this review may be registered trademarks of their respective companies.

The software was tested on a 1 GHz dual processor PowerPC G4 Macintosh with 2 GB DDR SDRAM running under OS X 10.4.10.

 

Disclaimer: When briefly reviewing share-freeware I will often use the developer’s product, functions and features descriptions. All other comments are strictly my own and based on testing. Why need I rewrite the developer’s narratives, if they are clearly written?

 

Introduction Including Publisher’s Summary

 

The reason that I’m reviewing this excellent product, now, in February, needs sharing. Last month, I gave a demonstration of Acrobat 9 Pro to our local Mid-Columbia Macintosh Users group on editing and reformatting, annotating and otherwise changing, downloaded recipes with Acrobat Pro. Since both Acrobat and Acrobat pro, having a broader set of features aimed at corporate users, than the recipe-editing task requires, I needed to check out an alternative to the more expensive Adobe products. [You patient reader are all aware of my interest in both cooking, cooking software and recipe collecting.] I had previously reviewed PDF Pro in an earlier version (2.1, in June 2005, 4.0 macCs) but the need for a second look at the software became a priority.

 

In response to a question from club members, I promised to determine whether for the editing methods I demonstrated, PDFpen or pro made more cost effective sense that Acrobat Standard {no longer available for the Macintosh} or Pro. {$450 (Adobe}, $405 {Amazon} and $150 {Academic.)

 

I’m licensed and am comfortable with both PDFpen Pro and Acrobat Pro 9, however I do not come close to utilizing all of its features.  In this review, I’ll provide a quick overview of PDF pen’s overall features, and as an appendix to this review provide a comparison chart of the features of various competing products.

 

However, the main focus will be on working with, on the web page and editing downloaded PDF formatted web recipes. This is a topic, which in part, I’ve dealt with previously in macCompanion. 

 

§       Internet Recipe Hunting and Recipe Reformatting Tips… A Tutorial Part III – Tuning Multiple-Page Complex PDF File; February 2007. §       Internet Recipe Hunting and Recipe Reformatting Tips… A Tutorial Part I: Hints for the Intrepid Internet Recipe Hunters; December 2006. §      Internet Recipe Hunting and Recipe Reformatting Tips… A Tutorial - Part II: Take a Shortcut w MS Word; January 2007. §       The Recipe Analyzer 2 — Software for Recipe Collectors — May 2005 {2.0 macCs} §       TheRecipeManager 2.0 — Cooking software to make finding what you want easier; December 2005 {4.5 macCs.}

 

Getting Started

 

No installation problems were encountered, after all this is a well and thoughtfully developed product, whose aim is to allow the intuitive manipulation of PDF at home or in a small business.

 

Features — I know you can get all of the information on PDFpen and Pro from Smile On My Mac’s website. Here’s a short summary:

 

Functions	Features
Edit PDFs easily with PDFpen!	§       Replace text in original PDF with editable text blocks §       Move, resize, copy and delete images in original PDF §       Insert and remove pages; re-order pages in a PDF by drag & drop §       Merge or split PDF documents §       Copy and paste rich text; retain fonts and formatting when copying from PDFs §       Select and copy text across multiple columns §       Add (and print) notes and comments §       Markup documents with highlighting, underscoring and strike-through
Annotate PDF Documents	§       Even correct text and edit graphics! §       Overlay text and images onto PDF (for example, sign purchase orders by applying signature image) §       Markup documents with highlighting, underscoring and strikethrough
Forms	§       Fill out and save PDF forms §       PDFpen Pro lets you build cross-platform PDF forms by adding text fields, checkboxes and radio buttons. Turn a scanned document into an interactive PDF form!
Other Features	§       Copy and paste rich text; retain fonts and formatting when copying from PDFs §       Perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on scanned documents §       Save frequently-used images, signatures, objects and text in the Library §       Automate PDF manipulations with AppleScript [Not Tested] §       Extensive online help, which you can access from the Help menu in the program. §       Valuable fact rich FAQ’s. §       Exceptional technical support; Adobe, Microsoft — Dream on!
PDF Pen Pro — Organize PDF Reports along with all of PDFpen’s rich features	§       Create Navigable Table of Contents          Add chapter and subchapter titles
Disclaimer: Nothing in this review should be deemed as a negative commentary on Acrobat and Pro. I use and continue to use that product in association with my consulting practice, working with government agencies and companies. However, the Adobe product is more powerful than may of us need. Indeed in my macC review I suggested that the developer create the equivalent of its fine Photoshop Elements, perhaps to be called Acrobat Elements. Wait no longer PDFpen & Pro are here!

 

Using the Software

 

As a first test, more an overview than an in-depth probe, I tested most of the feature of a PDF manipulation features important to me on various technical documents. It took a while for me to catch on to how to effectively use this product. I had help both from the help files on the SOMM website and more specifically for the information in the Getting Started with PDFpen guide a part of SOMM’s reviewer’s guide.

 

 This did however, not prepare me for the challenges I faced in the more complex task of recipe reformatting. Fortunately for both my piece of mind and the ability to fairly evaluate this product, I got valuable and responsive help from Phillip Goward, CEO and Lead Developer of SOMM Why, I initially did not understood enough about the products interface, as oppose to Acrobat’s, to use it effectively. This despite my initial overview of the product. My problems were NOT with PDFpen. They were due almost entirely to the fact that when I start to manipulate a PDF document, I expect to be able to work with it using the tools and techniques I leaned over years of Acrobat use. [I don’t even have reader installed on my computer.] I know it’s an oxymoron but PDFpen is not Acrobat. It’s my new mantra, this despite the fact that it would easily serve as an Acrobat Light or Elements.

 

My detailed testing was focused on editing two recipes I downloaded from the Taste of Australia website. A summary my editing goals:

 

Reduce number of pages by consolidating needed/wanted information by

§       Moving images from left justified to the right to allow txt to be moved closer to the top of the page to gain left side space.

§       Delete unneeded text including sidebar items, reader comments and blogger boilerplate.

§       Shrinking images both to gain space or to accommodate shifting text to either the right or left hand side of the smaller image.

§       Add a Googled image if needed.

§       Add personal adlibs or make recipe changes associated with my personalizing the recipe.

§       Remove unneeded time stamps and correct the page numbers that resulted from my reducing the recipe page count.

 

My Results

 

You can check out the original version of Chinese Beef w Sweet Orange Sauce at: http://www.taste.com.au/recipes/13972/chinese+beef+with+sweet+orange+sauce Prior to printing the recipe to PDF, I enlarged the text one size using Safari’s make text bigger tool [⌘-+].

 

PDFpen Pro Version using only PDFpen features – Ups, I forgot to move the recipe source.	Acrobat Pro 9 Version

 

Okay, what are you really looking at?  — Overall, there are only minor differences formatting between the two documents. Part of this is due to the fact that I made slight changes to specific text-image placement between working with the Acrobat version a few weeks ago and graduating to PDFpen yesterday.

 

In other recipe transformations, a few of the limitations I listed, below, as discomforts appeared. Those in large part focused on problems I had in attempting to Condense Text. Phil Goward shared a work around but I was running late so didn’t further experiment. After all, I got exactly what I needed using PDFpen, in a third of the time, ignoring learning curves, than doing the editing in Acrobat Pro. Not bad… at about 10% of the price, I could get three times the work done. Ups, I also switched googled images, I like the newly found one better.

 

And yes, the documents manipulated in PDFpen are all Acrobat compatible and will working in a corporate environment. No there are a few discomforts, see below, I had with the product’s limitations, all of which have been recognized by the developer and are potential grist for the next upgrade.

 

Discomforts

 

PDFpen to JPG or TIFF — I could not find, unlike in Acrobat, to export a document to either a TIFF or JPG so it could be used to illustrate an article. Several alternate work arounds solved the problem. Dragging a PDFpen file into a blank MS Word document concerted the file to an image. Copying the image into GraphicConverter, gave me a JPG file I could use. {I know, I could have dragged the PDFpen file directly into my review; isn’t 20-20 hindsight wonderful.  Phil Goward suggested I convert the PDF file by Printing t Preview and saving the resulting document as a JPG file—slick.

 

Condensing Text — In Acrobat it is easy to change the spacing of lines of text, to achieve a bit of space during document reformatting.

 

 

Clearing Active Links. — Many of my PDF’s contain links that are invisibly locked in place and moving test leaves the link indicator in place, with no easy way to remove their residues with PDFpen.

 

I Miss Using Arrow Keys — I miss being tweak editable text with the arrow keys, not a biog deal, but old habits die hard. Their use in PDFpen is lore limited than I’m used to. 

Conclusions and Recommendations

Since most conclusions are too lengthy, let’s try a 2¢ plain for a change.

 

This is an excellent product whose feature set will serve most users well.  I conceive it to be the Acrobat Elements or Acrobat Lite for the rest of us.

 

Although not yet perfect, the discomforts I encountered did not effect my reaching my reformatting deign goals.

 

Part of the macC reviewer guidelines asks, “What you’d suggest a friend consider before spending hard-earned cash.” My unequivalent answer is yes! The product, I’m a stingy grader; is clearly worth 4.5 macCs.

Appendix I  — Tool Comparisons Used for Editing/Reformatting Recipes

There are no obvious One-to-One matches in tool name-functionality between the two products.  — So what!

 

PDFpen	PDFPen Tool Functionality	Adobe Acrobat	Acrobat Tool Functionality
Edit Tool a Selection tool	For moving imprints around, resizing, and selecting to be able to apply new properties
Select Text Tool	Select existing text, or fill forms.
Correct Text	Replace selected text with an editable text imprint
Format Text	Allows formatting of text within an editable text imprint
Drawing Tool	Add new drawing objects — I did not use this tool
Functionality available in PDFpen	Edit Tool allows moving images and links, and added imprints.	TouchUp Objects Tool	Move objects around. Objects include both imager and uneditable text.
Functionality available in PDFpen	To edit, remove or move text, use the Select Text Tool first and then do Correct Text to get a fully editable text imprint that contains that text.	TouchUp Text Tool	Edit text by either deleting unwanted words or lines or add new words
Functionality available in PDFpen	Text Tool, and then click or drag out a box in the document	Insert Text Box	A way you can add text that behaves much like a adding a text box in MS Word.
Functionality available in PDFpen	Note Tool	Insert Sticky Note	Just what is says, except the note closes to a neat little clickable symbol.
Functionality available in PDFpen	Use the Select Text Tool then select what text you want, and then apply highlighting from the highlight button	Highlight Text Tool	Yes, it will make a word or three really standout
Functionality available in PDFpen	You can use the entire format menu within a text imprint, including fonts, line spacing, and tabs	Formatting Text	Limited Capability with TouchUp Text tool > Properties
Functionality available in PDFpen	Use the link icons hiding in the tools pop-up under the text tool in the toolbar. Link to a URL or a page number. Once tool is chosen drag rectangle around area to link. Links activate when the “Select Text Tool” is engaged.	Link Tool	I’m still not comfortable using this tool, because it works at an invisible hyperlink level.
Bottom Line: All of the tools I needed are available in both applications. Naming connections are different as are their location in either the tool-bar or under menu bar headers. The scopes of an item’s actions are also different, but over-all what you need for editing PDF formatted recipes is available at a mouse click. It’s all a mater of what you get used to… the practice thing music teachers nag you about.

Appendix II