PDF Expert, What Happens if I Update?

Sure, I’d like to know what I’m missing. :slightly_smiling_face: I use Preview a lot to quickview a JPG, read PDFs, trim pages from the end of saved PDFs, add a simple note, etc. I’m curious if I’ve run into the bugs you have identified.

For all of you who didn’t get the nag screen each time you start PDF Expert v3: did you sign in? And I don’t mean get a subscription… but enter an e-mail address or Google account to sign in to… yeah… something.

I am currently thinking using Foxit PDF on iOS instead of PDF Expert. Anyone have any experience with it? There is an Intune version without subscription. Will it work without Intune?

At the screen to log it, I did a force quit and restarted PDFExpert. No notice appeared after that.


JJW

Same here. No sign up dialog box after force quit.

To avoid hijacking this PDF Expert thread, a new thread was created with examples of Preview app bugs:
https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/preview-app-bugs-revisited/29781

Indeed, no sign in pop-up after force quitting the app and re-opening. But when I try to put a signature on a document, that nag screen shows up again. :frowning:

I’ll keep version 2.5 for now and will look for a replacement. PDF Reader Pro or PDF Professional look like they might be contenders. Haven’t tried any of them though.

Update: PDF Professional doesn’t support dark mode. So that one went out in a minute. PDF Reader Pro looks very promising though. $60 For a one-time one Mac license. That’s half of PDF Expert’s one-time license. And less then a yearly subscription for PDF Expert (that’s with iPad and iPhone apps though, which I don’t need).

Whilst I was a heavy user of PDF Pen, its deprecation sent me to PDF Expert. To be clear, this is only in those instances when Preview couldn’t do what I needed.

In the interim, I acquired access to Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, through my work. I haven’t used Adobe products in years (since being over on Windows) – am I correct in presuming that Acrobat Pro (no idea what the “DC” is for) should cover all my bases, in the event that PDF Expert stops working?

Or is their a more advanced tier of Acrobat that I would need?

EDIT: Does Acrobat allow for easy redacting of text inside a PDF, for instance? Does anyone know? Nevermind –– just found the Tools section, it has “Redact” (and a few other tools) that can be downloaded – seems this will be all I need.

Does anyone know how to get the 50% deal for existing licence holders? I tried to upgrade to the subscription in the app and it tried to sell it to me for the full price.

I think you either need to contact support or try and subscribe from a different device where you have not dismissed it yet (like an iPhone or an iPad). I also found that once you dismiss that 50% deal on first launch, it is apparently not possible to get it to appear again. :man_shrugging:

I use PDFsam for this. It’s not very mac-like, but it’s free and open source, and easy to install using brew install --cask pdfsam-basic.

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Thank you for sharing this, I’ve always wondered if there’re FOSS PDF editors that can create TOCs. Very glad to learn that they indeed exist.

Thanks @dario , I think i will contact support.

For those interested in creating PDF outlines … this app does it well in my experience. Only $4.99.

It only does one thing, but well. I use PDF Expert for everything else.

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Can anyone reference a good academic workflow for marking up a PDF on iPad and then exporting?

I have to say I’m torn on this one. I recently used PDFExpert a lot during a recent real estate transaction. But these kind of heavy pdf situations happen for me once or twice a year. Most of the time I’m just reading and highlighting pdfs which can be done in preview of the free version of pdfexpert. I do want to pay them for the good work they do, but $80 a year just doesn’t seem worth it for how little I use those features.

Would it be feasible to subscribe on a monthly basis for the period of time you need all of the tools and then cancel when the project is completed?

Yes. Monthly subscription is for such situations, when you don’t need it on a long term basis.

That’s a very good idea, I didn’t think of that. I’ll do that next time and enjoy the regular version for my normal reading and highlighting.

I switched to PDF Reader Pro. Found a deal on StackSocial ($39.99 valid until 9/10/22) and took the plunge.

PDF Reader Pro is perhaps a tiny little but more rough on the edges than PDF Expert. But offers a comparable feature set to PDF Expert 3 (yes three, not two!). For much less money.

PDF Expert is on its way out here.