When I am working with PDFs and doing something beyond just viewing and simple manipulation, the application I use on my Mac is PDFpen. I’ve been using it for years.
Smile just came out with PDFpen 7, and it has some nice updates and a few cool new features.
(By the way Windows folks: PDFpen is a Mac application, but a similar and great program on Windows is Nitro Pro.)
Some “nice to have” new features if you use it a lot are the Yosemite-ification of the interface, a pop-up context menu for editing (you can select the text and right-click if you want to apply markups and edits), and if you like to use the same colors for your drawing tools it will now remember them.
If you are someone that signs PDFs on your computer (as I am), you can use your trackpad to drop in your signature. I don’t personally do this – I have a copy of my signature in the PDFpen Library and just drop it in that way, but now you have options.
For me, the coolest feature of PDFpen 7 is the ability to view and proofread the OCR layer of your document.
For example, if you have a searchable PDF, you can see how accurate the OCR was by going to View > OCR Layer.
You can see the text that your computer sees overlayed on top of the scanned image.
Very cool. If you have PDFpen Pro, you can take things a step further. You may have noticed that in the scan, the mug I bought was 16Oz, but OCR read it as 16Gz. With PDFpen Pro 7 you can actually fix the OCR layer. This is awesome if you need to have accurate OCR text.
Another feature of PDFpen Pro is the ability to export a PDF to Excel. I have found that the more “table-like” the PDF is, the better the results of this are. Makes sense I suppose. You can also export to PDF/A for archiving purposes.
There are more changes (iCloud Drive support for example), and you can check out these great screencasts that friend-of-DocumentSnap David Sparks put together on Smile’s site.
