PDFpenPro - 4.0.2

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.