(In this review, I’ll refer to both apps’ core functionality as PDFpen, calling out features that require PDFpenPro.) 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. 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. 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. It also allows a range of image resolution (really density measured in dots per inch) in making the conversion. 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). 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. 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. 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.
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