I prefer PDF Expert’s UI, but PDF Pen has OCR and allows you to create fillable PDFs. I decided for the price, PDF Expert is my choice. I recommend doing the free trial for both. See which one you find yourself gravitating toward and make a purchase.
If money is an obstacle, Preview is very solid.
If you want OCR you could install Tesseract via Homebrew. Pretty accurate OCR via the commandline.
For more sophisticated OCR I use Abbyy Finereader.
I’m a PDF Expert user too.
Bad news everyone, there nothing better for pdf creation than Acrobat.
But PDFPen Pro is the next best thing for form creation.
For day to day use, I use PDF Expert because it’s fast and awesome and does all the annotation and form filling I need.
I must admit that my PDFpen Pro is version 7 I think. But the cost of updates was to much for me after upgrading a few times.
I have to say I sure like the price of pdf expert a lot more. A good majority of my assignments, labs, worksheets, etc are in pdf. I won’t be creating a lot of pdf but will need to be able to answer the questions by filling them out. Would pdf expert be good for this?
The main thing I will be doing with the pdf software is filling out assignents for school. I don’t really need OCR I just need a good app that makes it easy to load and interact with my assignments. Plus through student discount I can get the software for 29.99. Sounds like PDFexpert would be the best for me?
I would make sure you can’t do all you need with Preview.
re: OCR, I have been happy with OCRKit from ExactCODE.
I’ve been using PDF Expert for years, both in Mac and IOS and I am totally happy with it. It covers all my needs flawlessly (mostly creating, editing, merging, filling and marking up).
+1 for PDF Expert, both Mac and IOS.
I’d trial it with some assignments, but it should be great for that.
I use a combination of Preview and Bluebeam Revu because I deal with engineering drawings all the time. It has a tool chest that is conceptually similar to PDFPen’s library of symbols. It is definitely slower than preview, but if you need to annotate drawings or even documents, the keyboard shortcuts allow for a very fast workflow. You can try it free for 30 days, but I would recommend waiting to purchase it. The next version is in beta, renders PDFs much more quickly, and has a better interface.
PDF Expert, for sure. Just try it out. Readdle makes such great apps, you’ll be impressed. OCR functionality, full markup and annotation, everything you’d want. Plus, a fantastic indexing system that makes searching for key words or phrases (like, the keywords in a homework question??) super fast.
Another good OCR option you may already have:
FYI, PDFPen is part of the SummerFest sale currently going on.
Don’t forget Skim. It’s free, and more scriptable than anything else out there. Annotations use a Mac-only format that predates annotation in Preview, but converting back and forth is easy and reliable.
I really appreciate all the input! Thanks!