Mark Dalton

I have been using PDFPen from Smile on my mac as part of my workflow for a while now and it’s a fantastic product. I use it mainly when I scan in documents either to simply carry out OCR before filing in DevonThink or to make amendments to PDF documents I have been sent.

However for a while now I have been wanting to do a little more advanced work with PDF’s, including creating PDF forms. The standard version of PDFPen doesn’t support this but Smile on my mac also offers a Pro version of the software aptly named PDFPenPro. At $99.95 I found PDFPenPro a little expensive for the extra’s it offered over PDFPen which retails for a not inexpensive $49.95, but it is still a lot cheaper than the Adobe offerings. Smile on my mac also offers an upgrade route from the standard version to the Pro version but there isn’t any saving to be had by following this route, other than deferring the cost, and gambling on the exchange rate in my case.

However this weekend I needed to create a customer form and couldn’t stand the thought of trying to do it using any of the standard Microsoft tools so I upgraded to PDFPenPro. It was very simple to get going and within a short period of time I had the basics of the form laid out, and for what I needed to achieve this weekend that was sufficient, but I do have a few issues. Now I understand I am still on a bit of a learning curve so I have emailed the support team to seek confirmation.

I will let you know how I get on!

November 22, 2009 @ 7:52 PM – : Well the team at Smile on my mac have responded, multiple times, with suggestions as to what I may be doing wrong. I did try what they suggested prior to emailing them however but at their request have sent them the file in question for them to take a look at. In my book this is great service. I am probably missing a very simple step, but how many companies to you know respond within a few hours to a request. I am impressed.

November 23, 2009 @ 9:24 PM – : So this evening I received a response from the team at Smile on my mac advising that they had found what appears to be a bug and have raised the issue with the development team, but in the meantime provide a work around. They also had found a number of issues with the way that Preview handles PDF Form fields and in particular form text box borders and the “Required” property. I do however now have a finished product and all in all it was a simple process. I have a few idea’s on how the product could be further improved but will feed them back once I have done a little more with the product.

So I was taking part in the recent Mac 20 Questions Round Table discussion and I mentioned my “Digital Filing Cabinet” project and promised to send over the links (Digital Filing Cabinet Part One & Digital Filing Cabinet Part Two) for the show notes. It was only when I came to sending them I realised that that I hadn’t updated the series with the latest developments, something I am now going to fix.

So in Digital Filing Cabinet Part Two I was using Evernote for storing scanned documents. Well, this was all going very well until it came to getting data back out. I had a PDF manual that I wanted to share with a Friend but Evernote export features are lacking to say the least. Only one export option is available and that is in Evernotes proprietary format, what use is that?

So I went searching for an alternative solution and found DevonThink from Devon Technologies. I settled on DevonThink Pro Office and what a difference it makes. The data is stored in its original format and can simply be dragged back out. You can even drag out complex folder structures and they are perfectly maintained. DevonThink supports OCR and all the documents are searchable. I could rave on and on about everything it does but to be honest I am still finding things that I didn’t know about. If like me you need a little more than Evernote provides I would strongly suggest that you head on over to the DevonThink web site and take advantage of the free trial offered.

In Digital Filing Cabinet Part Two I was also testing out Mail Tags & Mail Act-On from indev Software and found both products to do exactly what they described, but nevertheless thought they were more than I needed given that most of my inflow is not in the form of email. All in all I think I have achieved what I set out to achieve and this has been validated by the fact that I now have time to work on some of the other project’s that I have been wanting to get on with for some time, such as my “Family Photo Archive Project” (Family Photo Archive Project Part One & Family Photo Archive Project Part Two).