A versatile, powerful PDF app won’t excite everyone. But if you spend a good chunk of your day working with PDFs, PDF Expert’s bevy of “I’ve always wanted that” options can be life-changing. Truly.
Here are a few of its especially slick features.
In-place editing
Editing the text or image of a PDF is usually a tedious process. Go back to the source document, make the changes, then re-export. But PDF Expert lets you edit text, images and links directly in the PDF. And, of course, you can rearrange, delete and rotate pages with ease.
When you’re done tweaking, select File > Reduce File Size to choose the best balance between image quality and file size. Thanks to iCloud, all the changes you make sync across your Mac, iPhone and iPad.
Annotations overview
No need to painstakingly scroll through long documents to see annotations inline. PDF Expert gathers all your comments, highlights, underlines and more in the app’s sidebar – and lets you quickly jump to one in the document. You can even export that list to HTML, text or Markdown format for a handy reference.
PDF Expert also offers dozens of “stamps” – like Confidential, Draft and Final – that you can overlay over your documents. And while most PDF apps have a redaction feature to block out text you don’t want others to see, PDF Expert’s Find And Redact feature blocks out all instances of sensitive text with one click.
Flexible reading options
Take your pick from multiple reading layouts, including split views that let you see two parts of the same document simultaneously. Use the handy sidebar to quickly navigate bookmarks and chapters. And choose among Day, Night and Sepia modes for easier reading.
Enhance your scans
Scanned documents rarely look as good as the originals, but PDF Expert can help. The Enhance Scan feature uses AI to sharpen rough text; remove distortion, shadows and stray lines; straighten pages; and enhance contrast. You can also convert colour scans to black and white.
OCR automatically
Some PDFs – especially those created from scans and images – don’t let you work with their text. Leveraging the Apple Vision framework, PDF Expert automatically performs optical character recognition on each PDF, so you can immediately search, copy and edit its text.
Convert to other formats
When you need to use a PDF’s content in another format, PDF Expert can quickly convert a PDF to a Word, Excel, PowerPoint or text document – or even to a JPEG or PNG image. (It can also open files in these formats and convert them to PDFs!)