2021 年の最高の PDF エディター

5.プレビュー

macOS用の組み込みPDF注釈

6. PDF Expert

PDF editor with the cleanest interface

Readdle’s macOS-only PDF Expert is a popular PDF-editing tool that allows you to make changes to text in existing PDF documents, including by removing and replacing images, updating text, and adding text of your own. PDF Expert lacks OCR capabilities, so if you want to edit text in scanned documents, you’ll need to look beyond this program.

Of all the apps I tested, PDF Expert has the cleanest interface and therefore was the most pleasant to use. Two tabs appear at the top of the screen: Annotate and Edit. Clicking one of them gives you an appropriate selection of tools to perform either annotation or editing tasks.

PDF Expert’s editing tools are flawless. Click text in your PDF, and tools for editing text will slide out so you can make changes. Select an image, and tools for changing the image appear. You can move selected text anywhere on the page you want or remove it altogether.

PDF Expert struggles with large documents; otherwise, this would have been my top pick for both macOS and Windows. But every time I attempted to open my nearly 450-page test file, PDF Expert hung. Until this program behaves more dependably, look elsewhere if you tend to work with larger documents.

Wondershare’s PDFelement Pro is a full-featured PDF editor with an OCR engine for recognizing scanned text and a standard set of tools. With those, you can fill in forms, annotate documents, create and add signatures, and edit images within a document.

PDFelement had no problem opening anything I threw at it, including scanned documents, large files and image-heavy PDFs. Once documents are open, PDFelement Pro offers a fairly simple interface, with a set of tools on the left side of your document that are easy to figure out. Just select a tool, and you can go to work making changes to the file.

Editing images, adding signatures and using annotations in the application all worked as planned, but I did experience some odd behaviors when I was editing or adding text using PDFelement Pro. In particular, when I was editing existing text in a document, the application wanted to make the text bold and would not allow me to change the content back to regular text. Also, when I added new text boxes, my own text did not display normally; the program always added a space after I typed an apostrophe. And the program constantly played my Mac’s system beep as I typed. That’s both annoying and not optimal.

Sejda is a web-based PDF-editing application that works on any OS that has a modern web browser. A desktop version converts that web interface into something that runs on your computer.

You can use a free version of Sejda, but it limits the number of daily tasks you can perform and the size of the documents you can access.

To get the most out of the program, you can buy an annual license for both the web and desktop versions for $63. A perpetual license for the desktop version is a one-time payment of $126, but it doesn’t give you access to future updates or the web version. You can also buy a weekly pass for both versions for $8 if you’ve got a one-time project that requires Sejda.

Sejda has no OCR engine, so you can’t use this app to edit PDF files created from scanned documents. You can edit only PDF files that already have selectable text.

To edit your PDF file, you upload it to the Sejda website and then use the toolbar at the top of the page to choose your tools. You’ll find tools for editing text, adding links, adding form fields and images, and signing or annotating your document. All of Sejda’s tools are rudimentary at best.

The app breaks every line of text in your document into a single text entry, so you can’t edit entire paragraphs of text. When you do edit existing text, remnants of the previous text often get left behind in the document. Sejda will let you add new images to a document, but you can’t use the app to edit or remove existing images.

Sejda isn’t a great app, but it works in a pinch when you need to make a quick change to an existing PDF document and you have no other tools at hand.

How to choose the best PDF editor for you

The first question you should ask yourself is what you need a PDF editor for. If it’s just to mark up documents and add digital signatures, PDF annotation software will better serve your needs.

Because there are several perfectly fine PDF annotation programs available for free, you can save yourself some money. (As we mentioned, Mac users can save even more time since the Preview app on their computers includes markup and signature tools.)

If you’re in the market for a full-fledged PDF editor — one that lets you manipulate text and create documents — consider what kind of features you’ll need for PDF editing. Applications with good OCR capabilities are likely to cost more; if you don’t need OCR, though, it’s possible to make do with a free PDF editor.

While PDF editors are great for introducing changes or notes to documents, they’re not necessary if you simply want to read a PDF. For that, we’ve got a list of the best PDF readers you can download.

How we test PDF editors

We look at both PDF editors and PDF-annotation applications. Every PDF editor can also annotate documents, but dedicated PDF-annotation tools aren’t designed to make changes to any of the original context in a PDF document.

While testing each of these applications, I used a few different types of documents, including large, text-heavy files; documents with a mix of formatted images and text; and simple documents with text and images inserted into the document in a linear fashion. I tested features like text recognition (when that was supported), and I tried making changes to text, replacing and adding images, and adding annotations.