PDFpen/PDFpenPro 5.0.1
Users and abusers of PDF rejoice, since Smile (née SmileOnMyMac) has released PDFpen and PDFpenPro 5, significantly beefing up the PDF editing and manipulation tools. Most notably, both versions of PDFpen are 64-bit, and include performance enhancements that speed the editing of large documents. Plus, when performing OCR on a scanned document, PDFpen can now take advantage of multiple CPU cores for added performance. If you need to redact (black out) information in PDFs, PDFpen can now do that easily, and there’s even a Search & Redact command to do so across an entire PDF in a single step (Search & Replace provides normal
text replacements). Image editing capabilities have also been improved, with the added capability to deskew scanned documents and adjust image settings such as contrast and saturation. Plus, PDFpen can now resample images to a lower resolution or color depth to reduce PDF file size. PDFpenPro 5 gains the capability to convert a Web site into a multi-page PDF document, can create list widgets and pop-ups in PDF forms, and can create a Submit button to submit PDF form data via the Web or email. Version 5.0.1 is current and requires Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard; full release notes are available. ($59.95/$99.95 new, $25 upgrade, free update for purchases after 14 February 2010, 42.8/43.1
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Notice that you can upgrade from older regular versions and to the Pro 5.0 version for $40, which is only $15 more than a regular to regular upgrade.
I gave pdfpen a try but was disappointed. Until now I edit pdf files with Apple's preview and jpdftweak. jpdftweak is a Java program which lets you attach files, edit the information fields, encrypt and various other nondestructive operations. pdfpen does not provide most of this task, which also mostly are not provided by preview. The only clear advantage of pdfpen I can recognize is OCR. I'm afraid, pdfpen needs a lot of improvement.
jpdftweak looks like an interesting and useful program, but it doesn't do many of the main things that PDFpen does, such as let you edit text and graphics in a PDF, mark up a PDF, and so on.