Smile has Released PDFpen 5.0

Smile has released PDFpen 5.0, the latest version of its popular and affordable PDF editing tool for Mac OS X. With this major upgrade, PDFpen includes the ability to redact or replace text, including OCR text. Users can also initiate search-and-replace and search-and-redact functions to remove multiple instances of sensitive information.

"As more people use PDFs to share information, the ability to properly redact private details within documents is critical," said Philip Goward, Smile founder. "Many high profile cases have come to light recently where sensitive text was exposed in PDFs unintentionally. Redaction in PDFpen removes the underlying text before putting a black rectangle in its place."

Image editing is significantly more sophisticated in PDFpen 5.0. Users can change the resolution and color depth of a single image or scanned document to reduce PDF file size. Scanned documents can be deskewed in PDFpen, which improves the performance of OCR results. PDFpen 5.0 also adds contrast adjustment and other image effects.


With performance enhancements, PDFpen 5.0 is faster. The new version improves handling of larger PDF documents. OCR is now multi-core, enabling parallel processing of multi-page documents.

A new version of PDFpenPro has also been released. In addition to all of the features of PDFpen 5.0, PDFpenPro 5.0 can now convert websites and other HTML documents into PDFs, complete with hyperlinks. With PDFpenPro, users can create fillable PDF forms and document table of contents as well.

What's new in PDFpen 5.0:
* Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) only, 64-bit
* Faster operation, better capacity to handle larger documents
* Multi-core OCR processes multiple pages in parallel
* Redact or erase text, including OCR text
* Search and replace text
* Search and redact text
* Forms support list widgets and http submit button
* OCR enhanced to handle colored text on a colored or shaded background
* Deskew scanned document pages for improved OCR
* Change resolution and color depth of a single image or scanned document to reduce PDF file size
* Adjust contrast and apply other effects to a single image or scanned document
* Enhanced selection of objects or text by auto-select of needed tool
* Auto-detection of URLs in text so that they can be clicked
* Select text within any rectangular region for copying (via option select)
* Pinch to zoom via trackpad; zoom by chosen percentage
* Measurements shown for rectangular selection and crop
* Facing pages viewable with page one shown on the left or right
* Print to pre-printed forms with option to print only the information added to a document
* Scale setting observed when printing
* Convert a website into multi-page PDF document (PDFpenPro only)
* Create list widgets and pop-ups (PDFpenPro only)
* Create submit button to submit form data via web or email (PDFpenPro only)
* Backend integration enables gathering data from http-submitted forms (PDFpenPro only)

PDFpen features:
* Add text, images and signatures to PDF
* Correct text in original PDF with editable text blocks
* Move, resize, copy and delete images in original PDF
* Redact or erase text, including OCR text; use search-and-redact or search-and-replace
* Adjust resolution, color depth and contrast in an image or scanned document
* Scan directly from Image Capture or TWAIN scanners
* Perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on scanned documents
* Insert and remove pages; drag and drop to re-order pages in a PDF; combine PDFs
* Fill out interactive PDF forms
* Copy and paste rich text; retain fonts and formatting when copying from PDFs
* Select and copy text across multiple columns
* Add (and print) notes and comments
* Mark up documents with highlighting, underscoring and strikethrough
* Save frequently-used images, signatures, objects and text in the Library
* Save PDFs directly to Evernote
* Convert a website into a multi-page PDF document (PDFpenPro only)
* Create cross-platform fillable PDF forms (requires PDFpenPro)
* Create and edit Table of Contents (requires PDFpenPro)
* Automate PDF manipulations with AppleScript
* Available in English, Japanese, German, Italian, and French


PDFpen 5.0 and PDFpenPro 5.0 require Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). Fully-functional demo versions are available at the Smile website

PDFpen will retail for $59.95 (USD), PDFpenPro for $99.95. Family Pack licenses, which may be used on up to as many as 5 computers in one household, are $74.95 for PDFpen and $119.95 for PDFpenPro. Upgrades from earlier versions of either application are $25.00, and free to users who purchased on or after February 14, 2010. Upgrades from any version of PDFpen to PDFpenPro 5.0 are $40.

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