PDF Editor for Mac OS X – What’s the best way to edit a PDF on your Mac?
Mac OS X, OS X Apps - September 12th, 2009 - 10 Comments
Need a PDF Editor for Mac? I did too, and this is what I learned. Adobe Acrobat is great with some killer features, but it’s expensive, really expensive. It’s hard to beat in it’s functionality, but if all you’re looking to do is make small changes and edits to PDF files, spending $300 for a PDF Editor seems a bit outrageous. So what are some other options for a Mac PDF Editor?
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 $250 and buy PDFPen. If you’re going for advanced PDF editing, get Acrobat.
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 – $299 – the grand daddy of all PDF editors, you’ll pay a fortune for it, but if you’re really serious about creating, editing, and modifying PDF’s this may be the best ways to go.
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.
10.5 (Leopard) also had the PDF editing capability in Preview.
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.
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.