PDFPEN 9 AND PDFPENPRO 9: EDITING APPS GET SOLID ENHANCEMENTS OVER PREVIOUS VERSIONS

You can’t avoid handling PDF (Portable Document Format) files: every website and program seems to generate them, either as a preferred choice or an option. And, often, you need to make some tweak or change in a PDF or fill it out when it hasn’t been set up by its creator to have preset form elements.

If you’re working as a design professional, you probably already subscribe to or have access at work to Adobe’s Creative Cloud, which includes Adobe Acrobat pro tools. If not, you likely rely on Apple’s Preview app, which has basic PDF handling, but suffered a series of glitches in Sierra that made it hard to use with PDFs. (Those all seem to be fixed now.)

But I’ve found in my own work and in correspondence with both design pros and regular users that Acrobat is obscure and hard to master, and Preview typically insufficient.

It’s into this gap that Smile developed PDFpen () and PDFpenPro (), which have matured for many years as an alternative. PDFpenPro is as full featured as Acrobat in nearly every respect and PDFpen just a little less so, while Smile offers each at a standalone price that’s reasonable. It’s much easier to master either app than Acrobat, and Smile has retained a consistent but routinely