PDF Editor for Mac OS X – What’s the best way to edit a PDF on your Mac?
Need a PDF Editor for Mac? I did too, and this is what I learned. Adobe Acrobat Pro
Best Free PDF editor for Mac
Preview – FREE – included in every Mac OS X install, the most recent version of Preview in Snow Leopard lets you make all sorts of annotations to PDF documents. In the Snow Leopard version, you can draw shapes onto PDF’s, and write text directly to PDF files for things like a digital signature. It’s basically a limited PDF editor, for free, and there’s no download required! If you’re looking for a free PDF editor solution, I highly recommend just using Preview.app that is already included in Snow Leopard!
Other Free PDF Editors for Mac
Skim – FREE – we’ve written about Skim before, and it works pretty well for making quick notes to PDF documents.
Scribus – FREE – an open source desktop publishing app that has limited PDF editing abilities, and the ability to create your own PDF’s
Best Paid Solution for Editing a PDF on Mac
I say this is a tie because PDFPen is great but a lot more limited than Acrobat, but if you’re just looking to make simple changes, save yourself $300 and buy PDFPen. If you’re a professional and you are going for advanced PDF editing and production features, get Acrobat, it’s expensive but there’s a reason: it’s extremely powerful.
PDFPen -$49.95 – a whole lot cheaper than Adobe Acrobat, with much of the same functionality in terms of making quick text edits to PDF files and the ability to edit faxes, OCR files, and more.
Adobe Acrobat Professional 9
You can also use this free online PDF editor on a Mac using Safari or Firefox:
http://www.pdfescape.com
http://www.pdfescape.com will not handle files over 2MB or 50 pages, but it is free.
The limit is not up to 10MB and no more than 100 pages. Nice…
10.5 (Leopard) also had the PDF editing capability in Preview.
I tried using Preview but the PDF form I wanted to fill out didn’t have the proper fields / fields weren’t recognized by Preview. Do you know any way around this pls?
If you need advanced review and markup capabilities, PDF Studio is a powerful pdf editor that supports most PDF functions. It also maintains full compatibility with the PDF standard which means that your edited PDF documents will render properly in Adobe Reader and on all operating systems (mac and Windows) the same. PDF Studio standard is priced at $60, PDF Studio Pro is $95. Much more affordable than Adobe Acrobat. And PDF Studio can pretty much do it all.
PDF Studio cant edit existing text in pdf documents, what a shame
I confirm that PDF studio can not edit existing text content.
But PDF Studio 7 will allow this. The new version is coming out in December 2011.
Qoppa Software did get PDF Studio 7 out, and it DOES let me change content – text and images – in PDF documents!
The cost went up a little ($125 for the Pro version), and I, for one, think it’s well worth it! Staying on the topic of this discussion, this tool lets me fill interactive PDF forms, type contents onto the non-interactive forms that I scan in (directly from my own flatbed printer!), and then I can do what they call “flatten” those answers onto the form so they can’t be changed by someone else. I use the digital signature option, to lock the file and add a picture of my signature.
Because (as Lilou wrote before) the files PDF Studio saves or emails (by the way, directly from inside the tool, saving another export/copy/paste) are true PDF, other people on other systems can easily read them and read and verify my signature.
Inkscape (www.inkscape.org) is a free, open-source vector graphics editor that will open and edit PDFs. It’s especially useful when your PDF contains vector based illustrations that require editing.
Does anyone know how to make Apple Preview’s added text boxes have a non-transparent background? (I’ve got 5.0.1 running on Snow Leopard 10.6.2.) Thanks! Skim has this option in its preferences, but Skim on SL will not export text boxes that other PDF readers can read.
We’ve just released a new PDF Editor for the Mac, ‘Proview’.
You can get it here:
http://www.coherentpdf.com/proview.html
http://www.coherentpdf.com/proview.html doesn’t say anything about editing existing text, only adding text.
[...] a PDF file created instantly by the print function. You can then view it later, use your favorite PDF editor for Mac (or Windows/Linux) to edit the PDF, distribute it online with something like e-Junkie, or [...]
How did you write the text over the pdf? Is it a new version of Snow Leopard?
On Mine ( Mac 10.5.8) I don’t see the option of writing over pdf. In Annotations can add notes – but they appear on the side of the pdf – not ON it.
The text tool doesn’t do anything when I click on it.
Open Office has a PDF extension that will load the PDF into a “Draw” document. You can then edit each element, including the text.
Needing full read and write-over capabilities I have maintained the acrobat suite. However, I discovered it is much more cost effective and actually better to buy Parallels+Win7+FoxitPro Business. FoxIt Pro is simply better than the original Adobe product for editing and creating PDF’s. They claim to be currently working on a Mac OS version. You can’t beat FoxIt on any platform.
Adam
Adam, I have to disagree. PDF Studio 7 Pro is the best PDF read and write-over application going!
In this discussion we’re talking about using it on Mac OS, and my business partners are also using it – one on Linux and one on Windows. We all three agree that PDF Studio 7 Pro has all the PDF creation, editing, and securing capabilities we need on any platform.
Plus, it sounds like your solution entails three different programs? Parallels+Win7_FoxitPro Business?? Instead, just get one program, PDF Studio 7 Pro, that runs on MacOSX, and have all the capabilities you need.