PDFelement Pro for Mac Review: Is It Better Than PDF Expert?

We’ve reviewed a lot of PDF editors for Mac over the years, but we were pleasantly surprised by the performance and features of PDFelement Pro for Mac

16:20 30 July 2020

The relatively unknown software from Wondershare beats a lot of industry leaders with a prolonged presence in the market, including PDF Expert, another great Mac PDF editor. You could say that PDFelement Pro for Mac represents a fitting alternative to PDF Expert.

 

Let’s find out why it’s better. Here are some feature highlights that should help convince you to switch over to PDFelement Pro for Mac.

 

PDFelement UI

 

The user interface is like the cover of a book. If it’s appealing, people will read it. Similarly, PDFelement Pro for Mac has a very attractive interface with a simple white and blue color scheme. It makes you want to dive in right away.

 

The main welcome page contains all the important and frequently used modules on the left panel. The main menu is conveniently laid out at the top so you can get to virtually any module quickly.

 

Key Features of PDFelement Pro for Mac

 

A solid PDF editor should cover all the important PDF tasks, such as viewing, editing, conversions, protection, image and data extraction, form management, organizing (page and file management), text recognition for scanned PDFs, batch processes, and such.

 

With respect to those features, PDFelement offers a robust collection of functionality, especially in the Pro version for Mac and Windows. Let’s take a look at a few of these key capabilities.

 

View PDFs

 

PDFelement is a PDF reader par excellence. The easy page navigation, multiple viewing modes, quick zoom in/out, and the convenient panel to switch to comments, bookmarks, and thumbnail views make reading PDFs an engaging experience.

 

In addition, you can make annotations while reading the document. It’s great for making margin notes, adding freehand shapes, underlining, highlighting, etc. without having to open another tool for markups.

 

PDF Editing and Conversion

 

The editing feature covers every single element of a PDF document, including images, links, objects, text, annotations, watermarks, footers, headers, etc. Any component you click on will automatically show you all the modifiable attributes for that component, which is actually a clever way to hide detailed features until they’re required.

 

Over 300 file formats can be converted to PDF using PDFelement Pro for Mac. In addition, PDFs can be converted into a variety of useful formats like MS Office files, EPUB, HTML5, Plain Text, image formats, and so on. Anything you convert to or from PDF will religiously maintain the layout, fonts, and other attributes of the original file.

 

The batch process further allows you to go through a ton of files in a short time and have them converted to the format of your choice in an accurate manner.

 

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

 

PDFelement Pro for Mac offers an OCR plugin that you can quickly download and enable. It not only recognizes and converts image-based text into machine-readable text, but it can do so even with a bilingual or multilingual document. The total language support count currently exceeds 20, and new ones are constantly being added.

 

The best part about OCR is that the software automatically recognizes text within images and will prompt you to perform an OCR conversion. You can choose between converting to editable or searchable formats.

 

In addition, the feature lets you extract text from image-based and scanned PDFs both offline and online.

 

How to Perform OCR

 

Once you’ve downloaded and enabled the plugin for OCR, opening a scanned or image-based PDF containing text elements will trigger the ‘Perform OCR’ prompt on the blue notification bar below the file name. Click it to open the OCR Settings pop-up window. Here, you can select the pages or page range for conversion, and whether you want the output as searchable or editable text. There’s also an option to downsample or compress the output if the file is too large.

 

Creating and Filling Forms

 

Most PDF editors have a complex process for creating forms. That’s not the case with PDFelement, which gives you templates, allows you to create forms from scratch, or even convert Word and other types of forms into fillable, editable PDF forms. The drag-and-drop feature lets you swiftly create simple or elaborate forms, or you can use a different source like Word or Excel to convert into PDF and still maintain the layout and other attributes.

 

Protect PDFs

 

Security is an integral part of PDF workflows because many businesses use it to share confidential information with authorized users. The enterprise-grade encryption feature lets you password-protect your documents and restrict actions such as printing, editing, or copying by other users.

 

You can also add digital signatures that are legally valid, as well as apply permanent redaction to sensitive content so others cannot view it.

 

PDF File Size Optimization

 

Some PDF documents can be quite large, which means they cannot be shared by email or easily uploaded to the web. To handle such scenarios, PDFelement Pro for Mac has a built-in file compression feature that significantly reduces the footprint of a PDF document by removing unwanted elements, compressing images, and so on.

 

To access the function, the user can go to File → Save As Other… → Optimized PDF… and set the compression and quality before saving the new file to a target folder.

 

OS Support

 

PDFelement Pro is available for both Mac and PC. It’s a much lighter app than Adobe Acrobat or PDF Expert and can be installed in a few minutes. Of course, the specs on your computer make all the difference in performance, but the system requirements to run PDFelement aren’t that high.

 

Pricing

 

PDFelement Pro for Mac is available for a very reasonable $129 for a perpetual license, $79 for a 1-year subscription, or $9.99 a month. Considering the rich feature-set and superior performance, it’s a bargain.

 

Conclusion

 

In truth, PDFelement for Mac offers far greater value for your money than any other PDF editor for macOS. With rich features, helpful tutorials, and excellent customer service, Wondershare has made sure that you won’t need to shop elsewhere for a premium PDF editor.

 

Moreover, Wondershare is currently running a Big Summer Sale discount of up to 50% off. So take advantage of the deal now before it goes away on August 3, 2020.