PDFpenPro - 4.5.2

Fred_4, exactly what about my previous comment led you to erroneously conclude that I am a PDF noob? I'll have you know that I got in on the ground floor of PDF form creation and completion when I started working in Congress in 1988 and in the White House between 1992 and 2000. During those years I must have created at least 100 PDF forms for download from one government website or another (mostly using Acrobat), plus I must have downloaded and filled out at least 200 more PDF forms on my own. And while still working in the White House I pursued advanced degrees, and in 2000 I earned a Ph.D. and began a new career as a geography professor at a Midwestern state university until I moved to the California Sate Univ. system and earned tenure in 2006. And in all that time I have been completely dependent on federal, state and nonprofit organization grants to pay for my research, professional associations, conferences and travel (to 37 countries now), and in this phase of my professional life I have probably filled out another 200 PDF forms so far, but since 2001 I have used mostly third party PDF applications in order to extricate myself from the fetid bosom of Adobe. So I think I know a thing or two about PDF creation and manipulation.

However, you make a good point. It is annoying when you download a form that wasn't setup correctly for us to fill out on our computers, and PDFPen Pro is a very good app that address this problem in a simple way. However, I don't think PDFPen is worth $50, and PDFPenPro isn't worth $100. Maybe $10 and $20, but $50 and $100 is just outrageous. Instead, I can use one or two freeware apps to do pretty much anything you can do with PDFPenPro.

For instance, if I download a form that was badly setup, with no fields in which to enter text, I just use the great freeware, open source app Formulate Pro to create my own text boxes and other shapes, then I type in my info and save it as a PDF document using Apple's brilliant built-in PDF creation function (Print > Save As PDF). Formulate Pro is a very simple app that's still in beta even after nearly 2 years, because nobody is paying its selfless open source developers, but it does the same text and graphics overlaying for FREE that PDFPen Pro charges you $100 for! Of course PDFPenPro does it prettier and with more customization options available, but for most people and even most businesses, that's not worth $100 when there's a free alternative. After overlaying text boxes, graphics or whatever else I need to do to make downloaded forms editable, if I need to do anything fancier, like move pages around within the document, or add my own markup edits, etc., I can use one of the other 2 great freeware apps -- Skim and Preview. In fact, the combination of Formulate Pro and either Preview or Skim is only slightly less convenient and efficient that just using one app, like PDFPen Pro, even if I had to do it every day for work.

So you see Fred, I'm not a noob, I'm just exactly the opposite!

If you're interested, here are the links for Formulate Pro and Skim:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/33391
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/32667

This app and its little brother PDFPen, are wayyyyyy overpriced. Considering that so much of PDFPen's and PDFPenPro's functionality are available for FREE in Leopard's Preview and a freeware app called Skim, this should really cost only $20, and PDFPen should be $10. At $100 and $50 this developer should be ASHAMED.

In terms of what I need to do, PDFpenPro does a lot more than Preview, and a lot more than Acrobat Professional. It's made a lot of my administrative and research workflow easier and more organized.

Forms, for example: you'd think that organizations making pdf forms would create them with the form-fill feature right in the Acrobat Pro software, but they don't -- they treat forms like paper in a way, still expecting you to download, print them, and then fill them in by hand -- and then you have to photocopy them if you want a copy for your records! This has really made an improvement on basic day-to-day administration. Being able to simply type over top of the page is simply the best feature of this software, and by itself is worth the price to me.

Commenting on documents, for another example: Word, Acrobat, and Preview all let us make annoying little notes in balloons -- but what if you want to annotate the document using traditional annotation markup? The library handily provides you with these marks.

The other feature that I use a lot is the ability to drag a number of pdf documents into the new PDFpen document, and generate a single pdf. Preview I think won't let you do this (you can view them that way but they save again as separate files). Acrobat will let you do it, but the "Mac-ish" interface of PDFpen is much nicer to use.

There are still a few annoying little user interface issues in this product -- sometimes when you click on the text imprint tool to to type some text over a document and don't drag your cursor enough, it creates a textbox so small that you can't type into it -- you have to delete it and start over. You also have to specify multiline text, and it's a bit difficult to get a really long segment under control if you paste it into a textbox. Another small annoyance is that it defaults away from the tool you last used back to the select tool, so you have to keep clicking your desired tool button every time you add something.

That said, I've had this software through several versions, and each time it's updated, it's very much improved -- updates are free or reasonable in cost. So, to the developers, congrats on a good product. Especially congrats on the continued improvements.

Personally, i like it: the interface is not very intuitive, but it allows to sign pdf and quickly produces "clean" documents. A good product, a little bit too pricey.

Fast and helpful support makes it even better.