pdfpen

My Favorite Lesser-known PDFpen Features

(An updated version of this article is available. Check out: PDFpen Features You May Not Know About)


PDFpen is the Swiss Army knife for PDFs. Some of these knives have so many functions, it's easy to forget you've already got what you need in your pocket. PDFpen is like that. Our feature list is already so long that we leave off some really great things. Here are some of my favorites.

Crop Page or Document to Selection

select_rect_tool

In emails, margins on a PDF are sometimes just wasted space. Before I attach a single page document with a one inch margin in an email, I open it with PDFpen, choose Tools -> Select Rectangle Tool , select the inner content, and choose Edit -> Crop Page to Selection. This simple operation eliminates a lot of wasted space and puts my content front and center in the recipient's preview of my document.

For documents with uniform margins, you can hold the Option key and choose Crop Document to Selection as well. This is really helpful for cutting down oversized margins.

Learn more about cropping pages and documents.

Number and Renumber Pages

PDFpen has incredibly robust page numbering support, including control over position, alignment, format, starting page, and template. PDFpen supports Bates Numbering, which is of particular interest to lawyers. The font used for page numbering can be set in the Editing preferences.

To add page numbers to your document, choose Edit -> Insert Page Numbers… . Feel free to try the various options. If you decide to change your page numbering style later, simply choose Edit -> Insert Page Numbers… again, and PDFpen will replace your old page numbering with your new settings.

Learn more about PDFpen's page numbering.

Print Specific Pages

You can use PDFpen to print specific pages of a document, even non-neighboring pages, sometimes called non-contiguous pages. Choose View -> Thumbnails, then select the pages you wish to print. To select non-neighboring pages, hold the Command (⌘) key when making your selection. To select a range of pages all in a row, click on the first page, then hold the shift key and click on the last page of the range.

With your page thumbnails selected, choose File -> Print… . You'll find that Selected Pages in Sidebar is chosen for you under Pages: in the print dialog.

Learn more about printing with PDFpen.

These are just a few of the lesser-known tools in your PDFpen Swiss Army knife. To find even more, try looking at the topics of the PDFpen help.

How are you using PDFpen? Let us know.