Readdle’s PDF Expert for Mac offers a full-featured seven-day free trial, which might be ideal if you just need a solution now and don’t plan on editing PDFs again for a while. If you need it for more than a week, it costs $79.99/£72.99 per year with a subscription, or $139.99/£139.99 if you choose the lifetime plan.
We found that PDF Expert did a good job of preserving the fonts, styling, and formatting of the original PDF.
There are two editing options that you can find in the menu at the top of the page: Annotate and Edit. Under Annotate, you will find the tool to easily add text to the PDF. Here you can choose the font and color of the text.
However, you’ll find the best editing tools under Edit. Here, you have the ability to edit text already on the page, add images, add hyperlinks, and redact sensitive information (you can choose to hide names or search for a specific word and delete every occurrence of it).
We were able to select text and move it around the page. But as we’ve found with all the PDF editors here, there was no way to drag and drop text between pages (to get around this, we were able to cut and paste while still creating a nice-looking document).
Go back to the Annotate tab. There you will find options to highlight, underline, or strikethrough text, as well as a move tool that lets you draw freehand in any color, as well as change the line width and opacity. There is also a crop tool. In Annotate, you can also add sticky notes and stamps (such as an approval). You will see a column of existing annotations on the left, making it easy to see what changes were made and when. These annotations can be exported to HTML, text, or Markdown.
Adding a signature is also done via the Annotate tab. You can add multiple signatures and these are added via the keyboard, trackpad or an image. To add the signature to your PDF, simply drag and drop it from the signature pane. You can also add a watermark yourself, perhaps your company logo, rather than having it added for you as is the case with some of the other essays reviewed here.
Resizing a large PDF was easy with an up/down slider that indicated the resulting file size. It was also possible to merge files, combining multiple documents into a single PDF, or individual pages from multiple documents.
We had a PDF that had been scanned on our iPhone via the Notes app (we explain separately how to scan a document with an iPhone). Obviously, such a document will only be recognized by the PDF editor if it has OCR capabilities that are unlocked in the trial version. PDFExpert could not do this, so we were unable to edit the text in the scanned document, although we were able to add hyperlinks to sections of the document. Obviously, we could not search the scanned document, nor edit the text in it.
We were, however, able to search regular PDFs and find a word and redact every occurrence of it, either blacking it out or deleting it.
We were able to export the PDF to Word, PowerPoint and Excel, as well as to Text and Image.
This is a seven-day free trial. If you need the software for longer and don’t want to pay, you’ll have to look elsewhere. But if you don’t need the software for the long term, this trial offers everything you need.
