Product Reviews

Even in the age of email and the Internet, forms and documents that need to be filled in, ticked and signed are still sent out. Even when these are downloaded as PDFs, you must print them out, fill them in with a pen, then either post them or scan them back into the Mac and send them as attachments. PDFpen aims to make the whole process easier by letting you write directly onto PDF files.

A set of tools allows you to add text boxes to any PDF, with full control over the font and size used. There's also a rudimentary pencil tool that lets you add ticks and even signatures; the path is captured as a vector object, which means you can adjust its colour and stroke at any time. You can even add rectangles, ellipses and lines to a document, as well as checkboxes and radio buttons, while selected text can be highlighted, underlined and struck through.

You can edit text that's already in the document by selecting it and using the Correct Text button to turn it into editable lines of copy. Text on multi-column pages is selectable by column - unlike in Preview, which selects lines of text across multiple columns. You can add both notes and comments; the difference being that notes are

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represented by a speech bubble, which reveals the content when clicked. Another useful addition is the way printing is handled: you can instruct PDFpen to print notes and comments in a separate area at the bottom of the page.

New to this release is the ability to interpret images using OCR (optical character recognition) technology, which means you can directly edit scanned forms. Also of great benefit is PDFpen's ability to remove pages from a PDF, while it can add pages by dragging-and-dropping between documents. Far less expensive and cumbersome than Adobe Acrobat Professional, PDFpen potentially offers an intelligent environment for annotating and correcting PDFs.

In practice, however, there are several glitches. One is that with certain PDFs, selecting text for correction produces garbage - almost as if OCR had gone horribly wrong. While this is a relatively rare occurrence, secure, locked PDF files will always produce gibberish when edited. Adding a line of text frequently results in the text appearing a fraction too high within its bounding box, clipping off the tops of the characters. There's a simple solution - to lower the baseline of the text - but this is clumsy and shouldn't be necessary.

When editing existing text, any complex formatting - and this includes indents, bullet formatting, colours, drop capitals and so on - is lost. Although an entire paragraph can be selected for editing, adding text to a line will generally just extend that line indefinitely, rather than wrapping the text through the paragraph.

While PDFpen offers a lot - including a Pro version, which adds fillable form creation - it's riddled with glitches and bugs. When these are ironed out, hopefully in an update in the near future, it will be very useful indeed.