• Filed to: Mac Tutorials
'What is the best free PDF Editor for Mac?'
Sep 17, 2019 Solution 1: Edit PDF Documents on Mac Using Preview 1 Adding Content to the PDF File. If you would like to use a free PDF editor for Mac, Preview will be your best option. The Preview tool is available by default on macOS. The tool is as extensive as other PDF editors with the exception that it is incapable of editing the pre-existing text. This online tool is compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac devices. As it is browser-based, you can edit PDF online with mobile devices. No installation or registration is necessary.
Here we've compiled the top 5 PDF editor Mac tools to work with your PDFs efficiently. We've found the best 5 free PDF editor for Mac to help you modify your files, including tools like PDFelement Pro for Mac.
Free Pdf Editor
Choose Your Best PDF Editor for Mac
1. PDFelement Pro-Clean and Powerful PDF Editor
PDFelement Pro is one of the best programs for all solutions to edit PDF files on Mac. You can edit, add, modify, and delete texts, graphics, and images in PDF format with this tool. You can also convert your PDF files to Word, Excel, EPUB, Images, and more formats. Furthermore, you can annotate and mark all the screen content with a variety of markup and annotation tools. It allows you to fill out your existing PDF forms, creates PDFs, and extract data from PDFs forms. The advanced OCR feature helps you to edit and convert scanned PDF and remove data from scanned PDF.
Features | PDFelement Pro | PDF Expert | Adobe® Acrobat® DC Mac |
---|---|---|---|
OS Compatibility | Mac, iOS, Windows, and Android | Mac | Mac, iOS, Windows, and Android |
Price | From $79 / perpetual | $79.99 / perpetual | $180 / year |
Easy Editing | Excellent | Excellent | Excellent |
Simple User Interface | |||
Markup Features | |||
Convert PDF | Microsoft Office files, Pages, ePub, and image formats | Microsoft Office files and image formats | |
PDF Forms | Create and fill out | Create and fill out | Create and fill out |
Create PDF | |||
Perform OCR | |||
Customer Support | Free one-to-one support and online help center | Online help center | Seldom get time response |
2. PDF Expert - Beautiful and Robust PDF editor
PDF Expert by Readdle is a start product in the Mac App Store. It has been rewarded as 'Editors' Choice,' 'App of the Year' and 'Top 1 Paid App'. It provides advanced reading experience on Mac. The cool thing is that you can compare two PDF files in the 'split view mode.' You can also mark up while reading. PDF Expert also provides tools to combine PDFs. Add, remove, extract, rotate, copy, and reorder pages to make your PDF files' best arrangement. Fill out PDF forms and sign electronically.
3. Adobe® Acrobat® DC Mac - Powerful but Expensive Choice
As the leading brand in the PDF industry, the PDF editor of Adobe® Acrobat® is no doubt of reliable quality. From the product interface, we can see, it has a wide range of toolsets. You can edit, comment, fill & sign, convert, combine, and secure PDFs. With the help of Action Wizard, Pro users can customize an action and run it so that you can deal with piles of PDFs with the same story. It is also integrated with Adobe Sign. If you have an Adobe suite already and enough budget, then Acrobat DC is a better choice.
4. Foxit PhantomPDF Mac - New Product by Old Brand
Foxit published PhantomPDF Mac in recent years. Been dedicated to Windows solution of PDF for years, its Mac version deserves a trial. This PDF editor mac allows you to edit text, convert, annotate, compress, OCR, and sign PDFs. You can also fill out forms and protect PDFs with a password.
5. PDFpen Pro
PDFpen Pro is an all-purpose PDF editor for mac. You can edit, mark up, OCR, and protect PDF and create PDF forms. Edit text and images, annotate PDFs with the highlight, notes, and hand-drawings. OCR scanned PDFs into editable text. There's also a redaction option that can black out your sensitive information.
Three Light-weighted PDF Editing Software for Mac
6. Preview - Mac Built-in Markup Tool
Preview is a light-weighted PDF annotation tool, which is built-in on Mac. You can add text, notes, shapes, and highlighting to jot down your thoughts and compress, convert and combine PDFs. It also allows you to organize pages like add, delete, and move. To protect your PDF documents, you can add a password. However, it has fewer features compared with professional pdf editors on Mac. It doesn't support batch processes and OCR. The most important is that it can't edit existing text in a PDF. Therefore, it's only suitable for those who only want to mark up PDF files. If you are looking for PDF editing software on Mac, it is not your choice.
7. Adobe Reader DC
Adobe Reader DC is a free PDF reader on Mac. As its name conveys, it only allows you to view, comment, and sign PDFs. If you want to enjoy the editing feature, you need to upgrade to Adobe Acrobat DC.
How To Edit Pdf On Macbook Pro For Free
8. FineReader Pro for Mac
FineReader Pro for Mac is an OCR product from ABBYY, a leading company in the OCR area. The highlight of the program is converting scanned PDFs with great accuracy. You can convert those documents into editable formats like Docx, xlsx, pptx, and more. If you often deal with scanned files, then FineReader Pro for Mac is your best choice.
Two Minority Free PDF Editors Mac
9. PDF Editor Mac
PDF Editor Mac is a free PDF editor mac from the individual developer. Although it may not have a beautiful interface and is not intuitive, it has the standard features for light users. You can edit, rotate and annotate PDF documents.
10. Skim
This software is a free PDF annotation and reader for Mac that allows you to make several modifications. It lets you perform tasks such as highlighting, underlining and adding sticky notes to better view PDFs.
For office worker, PDF file is undoubtedly one of the most widely used file format. When facing up a PDF business proposal or any other, you may need to edit it for further purposes. But how to edit PDF on mac? Actually, MacOS offers a free Preview helping editing PDF on mac. Here we will introduce several methods to edit PDF on mac with or without Preview.
Edit PDF on Mac with Preview
Apple also take PDF files into consideration when they design Mac, as Apple’s native application, Preview makes it easy to view and edit Portable Document Files (PDFs).
What kind of editing can Preview do to PDF?
- Insert and delete PDF pages
- Copy the selected text so that you can paste it into another document
- Annotate and markup PDF, you can insert a box, oval or line in your document, even change the color, thickness, or fill of these shapes. And you can highlight, underline or add strikethrough to texts in PDF
- Edit PDF text
- Insert your signature into a PDF document
- Add bookmark
Basically, when we talk about editing PDF on mac, we mean editing PDF text on mac. You can absolutely edit PDF text in blank area or on other texts with Preview.
How to edit PDF text on mac with Preview?
- Open PDF with Preview.
- Click “Show Markup Toolbar” >Text Toolbar, then drag the text box to any blank area and edit PDF text in the box.
- In the case you want to edit PDF by replacing existing texts with newly added ones, you need to white out the text first, then add text box to edit PDF on mac.Choose the “Border Color” as none, and then click the “Sketch” icon, you will be able to white out the texts you want to replace. Finally, choose the “Text” and edit PDF text in the text box. You can adjust the font size and color as needed by clicking “A”.
- Once finish editing PDF on mac with Preview, click “Export as PDF” to save the changes and allow no changes from others.
Tips: Although Preview is free and it doesn’t need to download, it only can do some limited editing for PDF files, if you want to edit a scanned document, Preview may be stranded.
Make PDF Editable on Mac for Editing
If you want to edit a PDF on mac as freely as possible, make it in editable Word or other formats first, then editing PDF in Word on mac. Cisdem PDF Converter OCR is the a recommended PDF OCR Software for Mac to turn any PDFs into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Keynote and other editable formats. Its OCR feature supports to recognize over 50 languages on scanned PDF files. That't to say, with this PDF converter, you can even edit scanned PDF on mac now.Even, you can utilize this tool to create, protect, unlock and compress PDF.
How to edit PDF on Mac with Cisdem PDF Converter OCR?
Free Pdf Editor For Macbook
- Open the 'Converter', import the PDF that you want to edit on mac to the program by drag and drop. You can upload multiple PDFs for conversion.
- Tweak the setting to make PDF editable on mac. Choose page range and output format, you can export PDF as Word or other formats that you can edit conveniently.
- Click “Convert” to get a file in editable format on mac.
- Open the file in Word or other file editor, edit PDF on mac, then save the file as PDF again by going File>Save as PDF.
Edit PDF online, free
If you don’t need to edit a PDF on mac that often, use a free PDF editor online. Here we pick PDFfiller, the PDF editor allowing you to add text, annotate, sign, comment, highlight, etc, also you can print and share PDF files online.
- Upload the PDF that you want to edit on mac to the online program
- Choose the mode you want to edit PDF on mac. If you want to add text to the fields, click “Text” and input the text. If you want to replace some words or sentences with new ones, click “Erase”>”Text”, you can adjust the location and size of inputted fonts.
- Click “Done” to save the PDF after editing, you can export as PDF or Word as needed.
Attention:
- Make sure your Internet connection is in good condition
- Do not upload confidential or private files for editing, potention risk of information leakage may occur to your PDF fiels
- Wait patient when the online program processes uploading, editing and downloading.
Edit PDF on Mac with Adobe Acrobat If You Installed
How To Edit A Pdf On Mac For Free
As the leader of PDF, Adobe Acrobat is undoubtedly a powerful PDF tool that gathers almost all operations of editing PDF. With this application, editing PDF is too simplistic.
What kind of editing can Adobe Acrobat do to PDF?
- Edit images in PDF files. It can resize, replace, and adjust images within your PDF file.
- Add, delete, or edit text. You can change the location of the text box, resize a text box, etc.
- Change the font, font size, text color, alignment, and other items of the text box.
- Search for a specific word or phrase as well as replace a word with another.
- Annotate and sign
How to edit PDF on Mac with Adobe Acrobat?
In Adobe Acrobat XI Pro
How To Edit A Pdf On Mac Free Trial
- Open your PDF file in Adobe Acrobat XI Pro.
- Go to Tools>Content Editing>Edit Text & Images, you can choose the tool that best fits your task. Add, insert or delete PDF text as needed.
- Save the file.
Edit Pdf File Mac
In Adobe Acrobat DC
- Open your PDF file in Adobe Acrobat DC.
- Go to Tools>Edit PDF, select the part you want to edit, you can add, insert or delete any PDF text as needed.
- Finally, save the file in Adobe Acrobat DC.