There are plenty of ways to view and edit PDFs on a Mac, but Apple's built-in Preview application is phenomenal and often overlooked. While Lion didn't wow the crowd with most of its features, it brought some amazing additions to Apple's PDF viewer/editor that puts it over the top and makes it our choice for the best.
Adobe Acrobat Reader Free for Mac - PDF viewer for Mac Adobe Acrobat Reader for Mac - PDF viewer for Mac. Adobe Acrobat Reader for Mac is a powerful and completely free PDF viewer.
- If you are a Mac user and have many PDF files on your Mac. Here-www.editpdfmac.com gives you the easy way to edit PDF on Mac, you can easily edit scanned PDF files on Mac, annotate, highlight, insert text to PDF files on Mac.
- The Adobe PDF Printer is not available or is unusable from Mac OS X Snow Leopard (v10.6) to Mac OS X Mountain Lion (v10.8). Solution Add and use the Save As Adobe PDF command.
Note: There are a few ways you could define a PDF viewer/editor, as features can range from simple form-filling to complete PDF manipulation. For this post we're concentrating on the features the average person would use, meaning viewing, form completion, annotation, and so on.
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UPDATE: Wondershare is claiming we named their Product, PDF Editor, our top choice. We did not, and they are using a false award that claims our approval. Please do not buy their products as they are a dishonest company. We've left the original text (stricken out) about PDF Editor in the alternatives section so you can see how little of a recommendation we made.
Preview
Platform: Mac OS X
Price: Free
Download Page
Features
- View and edit images in addition to PDF files
- Annotate, highlight, and mark up PDFs in several ways
- Digitally fill out forms
- Sign PDF documents with your webcam (read on for more info)
- Super-fast performance
- Super-fast search
- Insert new pages into PDFs
- View and edit PDF metadata
- Add and edit hyperlinks in a PDF file
Where It Excels
Preview is fast. Mac OS X isn't exactly known for its speed and efficiency, so Preview's ability to blow through PDF documents is pretty impressive. But among its many handy highlighting and annotating features, which are all solid, its ability to fill out forms is especially impressive. This may seem like a mundane thing, but when you get to the signature line it is hard to eschew at least a little reverence. Preview (in Lion) has a feature where you can sign a piece of paper, hold it up to your computer's webcam, and it'll turn it into a high-quality signature you can place in a form. It can also save multiple signatures so you don't have to continuously repeat this process. Preview is solid all-around, but it's those sorts of features that make it amazing.
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Where It Falls Short
Mac Snow Leopard Recovery
As incredible as Preview's webcam signature feature is, it seems kind of strange that there is no ability to sign with your trackpad as well. After all, Apple Stores let you sign for purchases with your finger on an iPod touch. Additionally, Preview wasn't exactly perfect prior to Lion and Lion isn't exactly perfect on its own. It's hard to justify upgrading to OS X 10.7 if Preview is the only draw. If you're sticking with Snow Leopard, your version of Preview isn't bad but it's certainly not the best PDF editor/viewer you can find. Apple fixed a lot of quirks in Lion, which make it a pleasure to use, but if you're not running Lion you're pretty much out of luck.
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The Competition
PDFPen costs $60 but is pretty great. If you need more features than Preview can provide, it'll get the job done. PDFPen makes page rearrangement, editing, multi-document assembly, and more very easy. While it's on the expensive side, consider it a cheaper alternative to Adobe Acrobat ($200). We've never loved Acrobat and it likely provides more features than you're going to need.
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Wondershare PDF Editor ($50) is another pricey option, but it has the ability to convert PDFs to Microsoft Word documents. We're not sure how well this works, but you might want to give it a try if that's something you need. Wondershare placed a false claim on their PDF Editor software that we considered it the best. They even created a fake Lifehacker approval image to act as if we provided them with an official award. We listed it as an alternative here, but as Wondershare has opted to falsely market their product with a seal of approval from us that we never provided, we ask that you do not buy from them.
Skim is a great choice if your primary focus is annotation as that's what it was design to do. It has an impressively long list of features to make annotation easy.
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Got any other favorite PDF editor/viewer apps for Mac that you love? Share 'em in the comments.
Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.
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PDF Reader For Windows Mobile is a ported version of Sumatra PDF for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 (PocketPC edition).
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If you are a Mac user and have many PDF files on your Mac. Here-www.editpdfmac.com gives you the easy way to edit PDF on Mac, you can easily edit scanned PDF files on Mac, annotate, highlight, insert text to PDF files on Mac.
- PDF editor for mac
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