How to edit PDF Mac

Need to edit the content of a PDF file but, having recently switched from Windows to Mac, you don’t know which applications to use? Do not fear. Even OS X can count on a huge range of software, even free, that allow you to edit PDF files in various ways.

There are programs that allow you to add simple notes and highlights to documents, others that allow you to alter the text present in the files and others that allow you to compress PDFs, merge them or split them with a click.

If you want to know what they are and, above all, you want to find out how to edit PDF Mac using them, all you have to do is continue reading: you will find everything explained below. I assure you that even if you are a newbie to the Apple world you will succeed in your intent in a very simple way.

Preview

Preview, OS X’s default application for viewing photos and PDF documents, includes tons of hidden capabilities. By clicking on the toolbox icon located at the top right of the software toolbar, you can access a series of very useful functions that allow you to customize the content of PDF documents in many different ways.

By clicking on the Aa | icon you can select texts (with the left mouse button), highlight them with various colors or cross them (with the right mouse button); the pencil icon allows you to draw freehand anywhere on the digital sheet; the icon with the rectangle and the circle gives access to a series of tools, such as arrows, geometric shapes and the magnifying glass, with which to highlight the important parts of the document; by pressing on the T you can insert customized texts in PDF files, while by calling the signature function it is possible to virtually form a document by scanning your signature with the webcam or doing it directly on the trackpad.

Furthermore, by calling the Thumbnails function from the View menu (top) it is possible to display a sidebar with thumbnails of all the pages of the PDF. This bar allows you to reorder the pages of the document simply by moving them with the mouse and to eliminate unnecessary sheets by clicking on the relative previews and pressing the Backspace key on the Mac keyboard.

LibreOffice

LibreOffice is a free and open-source productivity suite alternative to Microsoft Office and iWork. Contains applications for creating texts, spreadsheets, presentations, databases and printable documents; all in Italian and all compatible with Office documents.

Among its most interesting features is editing PDF files. By giving a document of this type “at the table” to Draw, the program for creating printable documents included in the suite, you can modify the texts contained in the file, add arrows, highlights, images, geometric shapes and much more. Interesting, right?

Then connect to the LibreOffice website and click on the DOWNLOAD VERSION xx and TRANSLATED USER INTERFACE buttons: the first starts the download of the actual suite, the second downloads the language pack needed to translate LibreOffice into Italian on the Mac. When the download is complete, open the dmg package containing LibreOffice and drag the software icon into the OS X Applications folder. Then open the dmg package of the language pack, right-click on the LibreOffice Language Pack file, select the Open item from the menu that appears and click on the Install button twice in a row.

In conclusion, go to the Mac Applications folder, start LibreOffice by right-clicking on its icon and selecting the Open item from the menu that appears (this operation is only necessary the first time you launch the program) and drag the PDF to be modified on the suite icon that appears in the Dock bar. For the rest, see my guide on how to write on PDF files in which I explained how to use LibreOffice by thread and by sign.

PDF Toolkit +

Now we come to PDF Toolkit + , a compact but very versatile application that allows you to edit PDF Mac by acting directly on the properties of the files and not only on their content. It allows you to compress PDF documents by changing their resolution; extract text and images; split PDFs into two or more parts and merge multiple documents into one.

You can buy it directly from the Mac App Store for € 1.99 and it is so intuitive that explaining how it works would be superfluous. All you have to do is open it, select the tab for the function you want to use and drag the PDF to edit into the software window: easier than that?

Notability

Another paid software that I advise you to consider is Notability, which allows you to create PDF documents starting from scratch, or rather from your own annotations; allows you to add notes and additional information to existing PDFs and synchronize everything online with services such as iCloud and Dropbox.

It costs 5.99 and you can download it directly from the Mac App Store. To underline the availability of an iOS version of the program that allows you to annotate existing PDFs by writing freehand or typing texts with the keyboard of the iPad or iPhone. In the university/school environment, it is really the best.

Automator

Do you need to convert your PDF documents to images or vice versa? You can do it all with Automator, a powerful tool that included “standard” in all versions of OS X that allows you to create custom scripts. These scripts can be called up with a simple click (or a combination of keyboard keys) from any application and allow you to deal with various types of files by editing, converting, renaming them, etc.

To get a taste of Automator’s potential – which is truly endless – take a look at my tutorial on how to turn PDF to JPG on Mac where I showed you how easy it is to extract images from PDFs without installing additional software on the OS. X.