This article originally appeared in TidBITS on 2010-09-23 at 7:04 a.m.
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"Take Control of PDFpen 5" Teaches You to Tweak PDFs Like a Pro

by Adam C. Engst

Have you ever had to fill out and sign a PDF-based form? Or change the date on a PDF-based flyer? Make comments on a document sent around your workplace as a PDF file? Scan a document to PDF and OCR the text? For those tasks, I generally turn to Smile's PDFpen, which can perform many PDF manipulations more easily than Adobe Acrobat, and at a fraction of the price. That's why we're happy to bring you "Take Control of PDFpen 5 [1]" to demystify the many sorts of PDF manipulation you can accomplish using PDFpen. Written by Michael E. Cohen, whose electronic publishing credentials predate even PDF (he helped create Voyager's Expanded Books in the early 1990s), the 132-page ebook explains precisely what you can do with PDFs using PDFpen [2] and its big brother, PDFpenPro [3]. The book costs $10.

After a whirlwind history and overview of the PDF format, Michael walks you through PDFpen's tools and navigation. With those basics taken care of, you'll then learn how to:

An appendix describes the many useful AppleScripts that ship with PDFpen.

This ebook was created in collaboration with Smile, with Michael providing feedback during the PDFpen 5 development process and PDFpen's developers tech editing the book for complete accuracy.

[1]: http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/pdfpen-5?pt=TB1046
[2]: http://smilesoftware.com/PDFpen/
[3]: http://smilesoftware.com/PDFpenPro/