Best Annotation Apps Portable Document Format

Acrobat Pro DC Best PDF editor on Windows Cost: 180 (annual subscription) Developer: Adobe Compatibility: macOS, Windows Category: PDF editor Acrobat Standard DC 12.99 mth Acrobat Pro DC 14.99 mth Visit Site at Adobe Full-featured PDF editing and annotation tool Excellent OCR Amateurish and cluttered UI feels unfinished Youd expect Adobe Acrobat Pro DC to be great because it comes from Adobe, the birthplace of the portable document format.

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But which of the many PDF editors, paid or free, out there is best for the task you have at hand PDF files may be seem to be permanent.

They were designed to retain the kinds of high-qualify design and page layout that you expect from printed media, such as magazines and newspapers.

But the best PDF editors let you make changes to the unchangeable, with tools that recognize text in scanned documents and let you edit text and images.

Best Annotation Apps Update The Original

If leaving behind notes is more your jam, then there are PDF annotation tools that let you mark up files and make notations so that someone else can update the original.

The best productivity apps for your phone Find the best laptops to get more done Need a PDF editor that can handle all that Not to worry weve tested more than a half dozen different options to produce a list of the best PDF editors for altering text, changing images and leaving annotations in documents.

What is the best PDF editor When you need to edit documents, the best PDF editor is SmileOnMyMacs PDFpenPro 11 at least on the Mac thanks to its host of features and outstanding capabilities in optical character recognition (OCR).

The app also lets you create PDFs, forms and tables of contents if you need creation tools on top of editing and annotation capabilities.

Thats great if youve got a Mac, but what about the rest of us Windows users (or Mac users considering an alternative) should turn to Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, which also boasts an impressive tool set.

We also like Acrobat Pros OCR capabilities, including how easy it is to edit scanned text.

Its text-editing tools are a bit limited, but it excels at converting and creating files.

In fact, in our ranking of the best free PDF editors, PDF Candy checks in at No.

If youre just looking to annotate documents, Mac users dont need to stray any further than the Preview app thats built in to macOS.

So is PDFescape, and since this browser-based tool works with everything from Chrome to Firefox, its the best PDF annotation tool you can use for free.

In addition to those recommendations, weve also tested PDF Expert, PDFelement Pro and Sejda PDF Desktop Pro.

Each app has its strong points, but ultimately, there are too many quirks for those programs to rank high on our list of the best PDF editors.

The best PDF editors you can buy today (Image credit: Toms Guide) 1.

PDFpenPro 11 Best PDF editor Cost: 129 Developer: SmileOnMyMac Compatibility: macOS Category: PDF editor Visit Smile Software Excellent OCR Extensive set of editing and annotation tools Editing OCRd text not always clean PDFpenPro is a macOS-only PDF editor thats been available for many years.

Its also available in a less expensive version with fewer editing options.

That version, PDFpen, is available for iOS devices as well as Macs.) PDFpenPro is a standout for Mac users thanks to its solid features, not the least of which is an excellent OCR engine.

With full PDF-document editing, you can make changes to text and replace images in PDF documents.

When you open an existing PDF file in PDFpenPro, the application automatically detects whether the document youre working with is a scanned image or already contains selectable text.

If its the former, the application asks whether you want it to recognize the text on the page.

That said, editing recognized text is not as easy as editing text in a non-scanned document.

Image credit: Toms Guide) 2.