That said, editing recognized text is not as easy as editing text in a non-scanned document.Īmateurish and cluttered UI feels unfinished If it's the former, the application asks whether you want it to recognize the text on the page.Įven with large documents topping 400 pages, PDFpenPro handled text recognition seamlessly in a matter of minutes, making the text searchable and editable. When you open an existing PDF file in PDFpenPro, the application automatically detects whether the document you're working with is a scanned image or already contains selectable text. The application's OCR tools are rock-solid. Additionally, you can create PDFs from scratch, create or edit forms, and create tables of contents for your PDF documents. With full PDF-document editing, you can make changes to text and replace images in PDF documents.

PDFpenPro is a standout for Mac users thanks to its solid features, not the least of which is an excellent OCR engine. (That version, PDFpen, is available for iOS devices as well as Macs.) It's also available in a less expensive version with fewer editing options. PDFpenPro is a macOS-only PDF editor that's been available for many years. Each app has its strong points, but ultimately there are too many quirks for those programs to rank highly on our list of the best PDF editors.

In addition to those recommendations, we've also tested PDF Expert, PDFelement Pro and Sejda PDF Desktop Pro. So is PDFescape (for files up to 100 pages), and since this browser-based tool works with everything from Chrome to Firefox, it's the best PDF annotation tool you can use for free. Apple's Preview is easy to operate and it's free. If you just want to annotate documents and have a Mac, then you don't need to stray any further than the Preview app already built into macOS.

In our ranking of the best free PDF editors, PDF Candy checks in at No. Its text-editing tools are a bit limited, but it excels at converting and creating files. If you prefer free software, give PDF Candy a try. We also like Acrobat Pro's OCR capabilities, including how easy it is to edit scanned text. That's all great if you've got a Mac, but what if you don't? Windows users (or Mac users considering an alternative) should turn to Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, which also boasts an impressive tool set. The app also lets you create PDFs, forms, and tables of contents if you need creation tools on top of editing and annotation capabilities. If you need to edit documents, the best PDF editor - at least on the Mac - is SmileOnMyMac's PDFpenPro 11, thanks to its host of features and outstanding capabilities in optical character recognition (OCR).

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