

If you redact and then simply save the document, examination of the saved file suggests that the redacted contents remain there, even though they aren’t visible in any regular PDF reader or editor. I have reservations as to how robust these redaction tools are in the face of forensic analysis of the resulting PDF. They work well on both text and images within a document. Included within those editing tools is redaction, which is offered in two forms: the traditional black box ‘blackout’, and simple erasure of the underlying content to leave whitespace.
#Review of pdf expert for mac full#
In practice, switching between them is quick, although some users might have preferred them to be integrated into one, as they are in the full tool shown above. Quick font changes are separated into two tools, though, one which sets the font and styling, the other its size.
#Review of pdf expert for mac update#
It can edit text, images and links, allowing you to correct errors and update existing PDF documents with ease. Its editing tools take it far beyond the likes of Preview. If you want to be sure that such content is cleaned from your documents, you should use an alternative command such as Save as Flatten…, which does appear to strip out old content properly. Instead, removing annotations actually increased the saved file size.

One caution here is that, although you cannot undo this command, looking at a PDF file which has been saved after removing all annotations, at least some of the contents of those removed annotations seem to be left in that source. One particularly useful feature is a single command to remove all annotations, ideal when you want to clean up a document ready for distribution. This means that you can use it to add an image of your signature, but not directly to use a service such as DocuSign, which signs a PDF much in the way that app code signatures work using hashing, to verify the document itself. It has a good suite of annotation tools, including the addition of signatures, but doesn’t appear to support full digital signatures at present. Within those broad options, almost everything else in its interface can be customised, making it a supremely powerful PDF reader. PDF Expert has an extremely flexible interface, which can be set up to run from a single window using tabs, or as a conventional document-based app. This article looks at its features and limitations, running version 2.4.22 (6110) on macOS Mojave 10.14.3. Readdle’s PDF Expert is one of two major dedicated PDF editors available in the Mac App Store, and costs around £/$/€ 75.
