Best Free Program For Taking Notes On Pdf For Mac

Unlike PDF Expert, PDFpen presents Mac users with the familiar PDF thumbnails on the left edge and page view on the right side view option, mimicking Preview on the Mac. Additionally, PDFpen comes with a library of proofing markup tools that are sure to be a boon to serious reviewers.

Click to view Despite the wealth of information a Google search box puts at our fingertips, good old-fashioned note-taking is still one of the best ways to build a personal knowledge database. The only sensible solution used to be pen and paper, but computers have introduced a handful of excellent alternatives for capturing notes in computer-friendly digital form. On Tuesday you shared your favorite note-taking tools, and today we're back with the five most popular answers. Keep reading for a look at the five best note-taking tools, then cast a ballot for the note-taking tool you prefer. Photo by Dvortygirl.

Best Note-Taking Tools?

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Evernote (Windows/Mac, Free)

Evernote is a free, cross-platform universal capture application. With support for text, images, audio, tagging, and syncing between its web interface and all of your desktop installations, Evernote offers seamless capturing of information no matter where you are. Images you add to Evernote are searchable by text, and Evernote even supports several mobile devices—including the iPhone and Windows Mobile phones. If you can't install Evernote on a computer, you can also use Evernote's web interface and clipping bookmarklet to pull anything into your notebook. Evernote is free to use, provides 40MB per month of upload space; for $5 per month or $45 per year, you get 500MB.

Pen(cil) and Paper

Despite a multitude of high-tech note-taking tools, the classic pen and paper still holds a special place in many a note-taker's heart. The low-tech gadgets readers prefer for pen-and-paper notes vary greatly. From classics like the Moleskine or simple notebook to the Hipster PDA or Post-It notes, the dead-tree route is still the place many prefer to take their notes. If paper is your preference, check out how to customize your notebook to take great notes.

Geek to Live: Take great notes

by Gina Trapani

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Taking Notes For A Research Paper

Microsoft OneNote (Windows, Shareware)

Tips For Taking Notes In Class

Whether you're a fan of Microsoft products or not, Microsoft OneNote is a killer note-taking app that integrates with every corner of your Windows PC. In fact, some readers even admit to running Windows in virtual machines on their Macs solely for the note-taking goodies available in OneNote. OneNote 2007 syncs with the web and other computers, provides two-way sync with Windows Mobile phones, boasts quick searching of all your notes, and much more. Finally, if you miss putting pen to paper with digital note-taking apps, OneNote's marquee feature is support for handwriting recognition on tablet PCs (you can even search your handwriting without converting it to text). OneNote is shareware, costs $100. Photo by DannoHung.

Google Notebook (Web-based, Free)

Google Notebook is a web-based note-taking application that brings Google's familiar interface and excellent search capabilities to your notes. The application includes a rich-text editor, labeling (Google's version of tagging), and the recent integration with Google Bookmarks. The Google Notebook add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer makes adding notes and clips to Google Notebook a breeze. With the right setup, Google Notebook also makes for one helluva GTD application.

Google Notebook Integrates Google Bookmarks

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Personal Wiki

Whether you've installed your personal MediaWiki (the software that runs Wikipedia) or you're getting things done with GTDTiddlyWiki on a thumb drive, wikis are excellent tools for note-taking. You can easily link pages together, collaborate with others, or just use it as a simple notebook you can access from anywhere. Since the primary point of entry for a wiki is your web browser, you can access your wiki from any computer with a browser—whether it's web-based or running locally.

Geek to Live: Set up your personal Wikipedia

by Gina Trapani

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Now that you've seen the favorites, it's time to vote for the tool you like best.

Which Is the Best Note-Taking Tool?
( polls)

This week's honorable mentions go to DevonThink (Mac), OmniOutliner (Mac), and voice-to-text service Jott (web-based). Whether it made the list or not, let's hear more about your note-taking app of choice in the comments.

PDFs offer a lot of advantages over other file types, but being easy to work with generally isn’t one of them. What makes working with PDFs difficult is that they look familiar, but because PDFs are essentially images, they are much more restrictive. This can make editing them extremely aggravating when you know exactly what change you want to make, but your software won’t cooperate.

Fortunately, there are a couple of great tools available for the Mac that make working PDFs a much more pleasant experience. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the best options available and crown our favorite: PDFpen.

Evaluation Criteria

In selecting the best PDF editor for Mac, we used the following criteria in selecting the winner:

Program For Taking Notes

Overall Design — Working with PDF files is hard enough as it is. The PDF editor you choose should provide a clean user interface with features that are easy to understand and use so you can complete your work quickly.
Viewing Speed — While much emphasis is placed on the ability to edit PDF files, equally as important is the ability to quickly find the areas you want to change. This can be slow and cumbersome if your PDF editor doesn’t provide a pleasant reading experience.
Annotations — Most PDF editing tasks require annotating documents and sending them back to your clients or coworkers, so the PDF editor you use should allow you to mark up your PDF files quickly and easily.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) — The ability to apply Optical Character Recognition (or OCR) is extremely important as it takes an image that looks like text and converts it to actual, computer-readable text. This allows you to search for (and depending on the app, even edit) text in your PDF files much like you would in a word processor.
Additional Editing Features — Depending on your use case, you might need additional features that are only available in some higher-end (read: expensive) PDF editors. These features can either be completely unnecessary or essential to your workflow depending on your work.
Sharing & Exporting Options — Once you have your PDF file ready to go, you need to be able to share it easily. In addition to sharing the PDF file itself, you might need to open the file in an external application. The PDF editor you choose should be able to send your file to other applications easily.
Price — The price range for PDF editors is very broad, ranging from free to hundreds of dollars. You need to consider price when balancing what a specific PDF editor offers against your individual PDF editing needs. Power user features may be nice to have, but if you aren’t going to use them very often, the extra cost may not be worth it for you.

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Our Favorite PDF Editor: PDFpen

Smile’s PDFpen application is a functional, powerful PDF editor. While the user interface isn’t the best of the apps we tested, it’s generally easy to use and makes up for a lack of polish with powerful features to meet even the most rigorous demands of PDF power users.

There are lots of workflows that are possible in PDFpen, but we’ve looked at some common ones to show the power and flexibility packed into this program.

Annotations

Annotations in PDFpen are fairly straightforward. To highlight text in your PDF, just select Highlight from the tool bar, pick your color, then select the text you want to highlight.

To add a note or comment to your PDF, select the appropriate options from the Tools menu. Notes can be minimized and display a text bubble icon in the document that you can click to expand, and comments are displayed as text on top of the page.

You can also add shapes to your PDF document if you want. To do this, select the Shapes icon from the toolbar, select the type of shape you want, and then drag it into your document. Once you have your shape, you can easily select a new color, line format, or line thickness from the toolbar.

PDFpen also has a library of proofreading marks you can use to mark up your document. To access these, go to Window → Library and click the Proofreading Marks icon.

When you’re done annotating your document and you want to print it, you can click Show Details from the Print menu to select whether you want to include comments, notes, or both.

Signing Documents

Signing PDF documents is another common editing task. This takes a little bit of prep work in PDFpen, but once you have it set up you can easily reuse your signature by saving it to your library. To do this, you first need to sign your name and scan it to your Mac. Once you have the file, you can drag it into PDFpen, but you’ll see that the image file will have a background that obstructs whatever the signature is sitting on top of (usually it’s white). You can make the background transparent by going to Edit → Make Transparent Image. This will open a popup with an eyedropper tool where you can select the background color that you want to make transparent.

Once you select the background color and click Make Transparent, you’ll have a signature that you can drag to the appropriate place in the document and resize by dragging one of the corners.

Once you have your signature ready, you can save it for re-use. You can do this by going to Window → Library to make sure the Library window is open, then go to the Library window and select the + icon, and click Add Selected Imprint to save the transparent signature image to your Library.

Applying OCR

Optical Character Recognition is extremely important when dealing with PDF files as it allows the computer to identify the text contents of your document. Without it, all it sees is a bunch of pixels, which means you can’t do anything that involves text selection (i.e. copy & paste) and you won’t be able to search your document and find a selected word or phrase.

This is one area PDFpen really shines as it is incredibly easy to apply OCR to a document. In fact, when you open a PDF file in PDFpen that it thinks is scanned, a dialog box will appear and ask you if you’d like to apply OCR to a particular page or to the entire document. You can even select from multiple languages.

Redacting Text

Occasionally you’ll need to share PDF documents that contain text you don’t want others to be able to see (like address, telephone number, etc.). PDFpen has you covered there too, as it allows you to find and redact text to hide personal or sensitive information.

To redact text in PDFpen, first click the Find button in the toolbar and type in the text you want to redact. You’ll see all the instances of that text appearing in the document in the box below your search term. Next, click Find in the dropdown menu and select Redact.

Finally, select the instance you want to redact from the list and click Redact. If you want to redact all instances of the text, you can also click Redact All to redact them all at once.

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Exporting to Microsoft Word (or other word processors)

Let’s say you get a contract from someone that you want to edit. Frequently these documents are sent as PDF files specifically because it makes it harder to make changes, but PDFpen’s export to Microsoft Word feature makes this easy as well. All you have to do is click File → Export and select the desired file format.

This will allow you to easily edit the text in the document and you can then export back to PDF by clicking File → Print and selecting Save as PDF.

Additional Features

If your PDF needs extend beyond the scope of the standard PDFpen application, you can also check out PDFpen Pro, which includes the following additional features:

Turn websites into PDFs
Create and edit forms
Export to Excel, Powerpoint, and PDF/A
Add and edit permissions
Create and edit Table of Contents
Create links from URLs

PDFpen is availabe for $75 on the Smile software website, and PDFpen Pro is $125 if you need the additional features.

Runner Up: PDF Expert

PDF Expert by Readdle Software is an excellent application with one major flaw: It doesn’t have the ability to add OCR to your PDF files. This is absolutely critical when editing PDF files, so the lack of this single feature is unfortunately a dealbreaker for a lot of people.

For a lot of PDF-based tasks, PDF Expert is fine. It offers a blazing fast PDF reading experience, and has very good annotation tools. It also offers the tools to edit, merge, and sign documents as well as fill forms. Once you’re done editing your PDF file, PDF Expert integrates fully with the Mac share sheet so you can send it to any application that accepts PDFs. It does all of this with a beautiful user interface and a price tag ($59.99) that is on par with the other PDF editors we looked at. If you’re a student, you can even snag a small education discount when purchasing directly from Readdle.

Other Options

Adobe Acrobat Pro — Adobe actually created the PDF file format back in 1991, so you might think that Adobe Acrobat Pro would be the hands-down favorite for the best PDF editor for Mac. While it’s true that Adobe Acrobat Pro is an extremely powerful PDF editor, it’s also incredibly expensive. It’s available via subscription for $15/month or as part of the Creative Cloud suite ($49/month), and is also available as a stand-alone product for $449. In our opinion, Adobe Acrobat Pro is not as easy to use as PDFpen Pro, and the incredibly high price is not justified unless you really need some Adobe-only features or already have a Creative Cloud subscription.
Preview — Preview is the default PDF editor that comes bundled with Mac OS X, and is actually a pretty decent tool for basic PDF editing tasks. Depending on your needs, Preview might be enough for you. For example, you can make basic annotations, reorder pages, and even sign documents in Preview. But in our testing, annotations made in Preview sometimes didn’t display correctly in other PDF editors, and if you work with PDFs frequently, you’ll soon hit the limit of what Preview is capable of. Preview is “fine” for occasional PDF editing, but for anything more you’re going to want a more powerful PDF editor in your arsenal.
Everything Else – A quick internet search will show that there is no shortage of PDF editing software options, but many of them look like they haven’t been updated since before 2008 when Adobe released the PDF file format as an open standard per ISO 32000-1, and most lack even basic features that are present in Preview. Even if these companies are legit (and a lot of them aren’t), it’s not worth your time to look here. If you’re looking for a cheap/free PDF editor for basic PDF editing, try Preview first.

Conclusion

If you’re looking to edit PDFs on your Mac, quality options are hard to come by, and PDFpen is the cream of the (very limited) crop. PDFpen offers enough features to complete just about any standard PDF editing task quickly and easily, and offers a Pro version for those who need the extra features. If you don’t work with PDFs regularly or don’t need all the bells and whistles that PDFpen offers, PDF Expert offers a great user interface for basic edits and is probably powerful enough for most people at a much lower price point.

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Methods Of Taking Notes Instructor

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