PDFpen 5 – PDF Editor App Reviews

Hopefully soon to be fixed but many pages are truncated and not viewable. Rotating often shows balance of page but it is easy to miss truncated parts unless pixels of invisible text indicate. I paid the money to upgrade but the upgrade is less stable than predecessor which also had problems. Other bugs I have encountered also. This is not ready for release.

Cant find another app like it and it is - so far -essential. Two issues: 1) Folder management is VERY BUGGY. Its very easy to put a document into a folder by accident and never be able to remove it afterward. 2) Inability to import .doc as a pdf, which means I have to use multiple apps to organize my reading documents, or time-consumingly have to convert them elsewhere. There are a few more interface issues that make it less than intuitive and even problematic, but I use this all the time because of lack of other options for PDF management.

Spent $22 on this app to use on my iPad mini. Does not work. Space cannot sign cannot annotate just can only read on the iPad mini.

I purchased this app for use in college. A lot of my teachers give assignments where I have a pdf to read, annotate, and bring in for class discussions. Rather than demolish a forest, I figured I could use my iPad and/or iPhone for this purpose. (Please note: my iPad is an Air 2 and my iPhone, a 6 plus. They both have 128 gb of internal storage. My problems are not related to device problems) Overall, the annotation features are very smooth and work well. Text highlighting in particular works extremely well. My issue are the overwhelming number of bugs this app has. Frequently upon loading a saved folder (thatll have, say, five important PDFs in it), theyll disappear suddenly, with no explanation. The app will reload my home screen and my valuable work will be completely lost and irrecoverable. There are also bugs with the display. On zooming in, a large white rectangle will appear unpredictably over a large portion of the page, and it can be difficult to fix. Finally, some important features are missing. What about cropping? That seems like it would be a fairly basic feature, all things considered. 2/5 stars; its good but unreliable enough I have to find a better (more stable) app.

PDFpenPro 7 for the laptop/desktop computer along with PDFpenPro, version 2 for the iPhone/iPad are useful tools. I have used both versions for over a year, and regularly have used both to annotate, highlight, or make changes to text. Recently I needed to create a form that allowed for form fields. I had not done that before. The document I was creating was a bit complicated, and when I realized I needed some help I contacted Smile. You know a good product not only by all of the ways you can use it, but by the support you get from the company when you need a little help. My experience with this company kept me smiling. The replies to my questions not only came back in record time, but the support was both informative and courteous. I highly recommend the application and app along with the company behind the product.

I used to have a simple version of PDFpen and it worked beautifully. Then one day it just stopped on my iPhone six. I thought I needed to upgrade it so I spent $20 and it still doesnt work I cant sign anything. Waste of money!

With stylus settings set to "none" the scribble tool to draw free hand does not work with your fingers. Ugh! Why bother?

Ive loaded and then deleted this app a couple of times. Its really a horrible user interface. A couple of things I noticed in the last attempt to use this. * I couldnt easily zoom in to annotate files. When I switched to free form mode I expected to pinch zoom to make the writing area bigger. * when I added a text box the handle is so small I couldnt easily move the box. I had to leave text edit mode then select it again to put it into place. * The final straw was trying to delet a file. I press hold to put it into delet mode. Trash can appears. I cant drag into the trash can and when I lift my finger to tap trash can it disappears. Save your money try good reader instead. I really wish I could get a refund.

Save your money. I got only so far as to try to rotate pages in a document - after 6 attempts, and 6 crashes, Ive given up.

I like the idea of the app, but the implementation is bad for a second generation product. Precisely highlighting text is difficult because your finger obscures the text. There should be an option to match the highlight colors of preview on the mac. If saving a file to iCloud fails, the program responds by throwing away all your work instead of saving a copy locally and allowing you to try again.

Lacks the stability of the mac client.

What a waste of money! After selecting a certain color with the freehand annotation tool, annotations no longer work! I close out the app, Ive restarted my iPad still nothing. The only way to make it work again is to uninstall and reinstall the app. This is absolutely ridiculous! For a $20 piece of software MADE for PDF annotations, it should actually annotate PDFs!

I work in the book publishing industry and deal with large, complex PDFs. PDFPen is my go-to PDF tool (PDFs on my Mac are set to open in PDFPen by default). With PDFPen loaded on my iOS devices, I can seamlessly transition from working on a PDF on my Mac at the office to finishing up in my iPad at home. PDFPen allows me to easily ... * markup documents, * sign documents, * highlight text, * perform OCR (with PDFPen Scan+) and edit the results, and * do a bunch of other stuff (that I never use). Smile software offers very responsive support. On a couple of occasions Ive e-mailed Smile with questions and always received a response within 24 hours. PDFPen is a great piece of software with great support.

I made annotations to a document then reopened it. Not only were the annotations missing, whole pieces of the original PDF were missing.

What I want the most from this app is to be able to return it. It is not even better than lots of free apps I have get. Just ignore this one.

I use this to read all PDFs. I love that I can start on Mac, then pick up where I left off on phone or iPad with all highlights and notes stored immediately on iCloud! Also perfect combo to save to Evernote when done for long term storage and organization. Perfect for reading high volumes and being on the fly, which I do a lot as a new doctor!

I have to say, I was pretty surprised at how poorly this version of PDFPen functions. I decided to ignore the poor reviews and base my purchase decision on my previous experience with Smile. However, I regret purchasing this app. It is extremely buggy and difficult to use effectively. I do not recommend purchasing it. PDF Expert is a far better alternative.

This is truly powerful pdf editing software that is SO much more useful than the Adobe software (even with a DC subscription), however the software is now so buggy that it crashes pretty much every time I use it. Ive been a pdfpen customer since 2007, but this app (and the desktop counterpoint for that matter) cannot be counted on any longer for real work as you cannot trust that the app wont crash in the middle of using it. Not recommended in its current state.

I loved this app and used it all the time, but now I cant even keep it open for longer than 5 seconds before it crashes. I hope what I have there is safe! Are there any plans to fix this bug?

It does not calibrate my stylus.