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Nitro PDF Pro and PDF Pro Essentials 13.3

Nitro has released version 13.3 of its PDF editing apps Nitro PDF Pro and Nitro PDF Pro Essentials (formerly PDFpenPro and PDFpen; see “Nitro Acquires PDFpen from Smile,” 12 July 2021) with support for Shortcuts in macOS 12 Monterey. The release also lets you add clear highlights to PDF text (decreasing the risk of bleeding or overlapping colors) and makes full OCR Pages/Documents options available under the Edit menu. ($179.99/129.99 new, free update for Nitro license, in Setapp, 259/212 MB, release notes, macOS 10.14+)

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Comments About Nitro PDF Pro and PDF Pro Essentials 13.3

Notable Replies

  1. I find Nitro to be very unclear about how they will handle upgrades for those of us who bought from PDFPen. I actually contacted their support and got a vague and non committal answer. Doesn’t seem they are committed to hiding onto the user base they just purchased.

  2. The trick to getting the $35 upgrade price from any previous version of PDF Pen Pro is to submit a Support Ticket here:

    When I did that a week ago, I got an email response within 1 or 2 days asking me to email them proof of purchase and my serial number. (Notwithstanding that the support ticket submission requests your serial number and that their own online purchase history lookup also has your serial number.) When I complied, 2 days later they sent me an email with a coupon code that reduced the price of a new purchase of Pro from $180 to $35.

    The impossibility of getting the $35 upgrade price by clicking the upgrade button in the app has persisted for an entire year:

    I wonder whether they are obscuring it intentionally hoping to collect a higher upgrade price. But if they want to raise the upgrade price, why not just do it and announce it?

  3. It turns out if you own PDPenFPro 13.x, you can convert to Nitro Pdf Pro with no upgrade charge. You’ll need your PDFPenPro registration information. Then download Nitro PDF Pro from Product Updates

    Install the app and start it. One of the options is to upgrade from PDFpen Pro. It will ask for your PDFPen Pro registration info and you should be good to go. You supply you r email address and ask that Nitro/Smile look it up and you will get an email with the PDFpenPro registration information.

    After you do that, close both apps and download the migration tool to migrate your PDFpen Pro settings to Nitro PDF Pro.

    I received no notes about how to do this and the Nitro website did not have any upfront information about doing this.

  4. How did you get it to download a macOS version? Regardless of whether I use Chrome or Safari, I get the windows (.exe) version.

    Thanks.

    Kevin

  5. It worked when I did it but now fails. However, going to the PDFpen download site will download the current mac Nitro PDF (version 13.3) software.

  6. That worked. Thank you.

    Kevin

  7. After a while I found myself again in need to OCR and produce searchable PDF of a scanned book of mine. Have been using PDFPen for years now and only for that purpose. But then wanted to give Apple Vision Framework OCR a shot. I must report v2 returns very satisfactory results through an app integrating it. Have not tried v3. Although PDFPen has many more functions I see his competitive edge getting more and more truncated by a rising baseline.

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