Best 10 Free PDF Editors for Mac 2020

Fri. 05 Jun. 202054633

If the style or formatting of documents was changed in the process of transmission or opening, important information could be misunderstood. The greatest strength of PDF documents is that their contents doesn’t change no matter what kind of program you use to open them or what device you’re viewing them on. PDF documents are widely used for business, school, or general use. Here, we collected the best 10 free PDF editors for Mac to help Mac users easily work with PDFs.


Most programs can save documents in the PDF format but can’t edit them. We usually need to edit text in a PDF, add signature, add comments, redact information, combine lots of PDFs, rotate pages, reduce the size of a PDF, and even convert PDFs to Word, Excel and other file formats on Mac. If you are looking for a free PDF editor Mac, this article will help you a lot.


10 Best Free PDF Editors for Mac at a Glance:


PDF Reader Pro

The developers of PDF Reader Pro, dedicated to PDF functional research and development, have outstanding performance in PDF features. This application gives the simplest way to annotate, edit, create, convert, fill form, OCR, and sign PDF documents.

Main Features of PDF Reader Pro:

- Read & Annotate PDF on Mac

  • Day, Night or Sepia mode are available, which will please your eyes by flipping from bright white to subdued dark.

  • If you have more than one reading tasks at one time, Multi-tabbed offers multi-tasks and an effective reading experience.

  • PDF Reader Pro provides a complete set of commenting tools, so you can annotate and mark up PDFs easily. You can view and change comments properties on the side panel.

annotate PDF on Mac with PDF Reader Pro

- Edit PDFs on Mac

  • With this PDF editor for Mac, you can directly edit original text without leaving your PDF, including adding, deleting, moving and modifying texts. Changing the font size and style are also supported.

  • PDF Reader Pro is also a PDF page editor, you can insert, extract, replace, rotate, reverse, copy, or delete PDF pages on Mac.

  • It is easy to split one PDF into multiple PDF files and merge several PDF files into one.

edit PDF on Mac with PDF Reader Pro

- Convert PDF to Office & OCR

  • PDF Reader Pro enables you to convert PDF to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Image and other formats and remain the fonts and layouts intact unchanged.

  • OCR function makes turning scanned documents and images into fully editable, selectable and searchable PDFs easily. There are over 50 languages available.

convert pdf to office on Mac with PDF Reader Pro

- Fill Form & Sign PDFs on Mac

  • You can directly create form on PDF, and you can fill PDF forms and highlights form fields easily on devices, submit it.

  • You can add your signature with cursor mouse, MacBook's trackpad, Keyboard or Images.

fill PDF form on Mac with PDF Reader Pro

More Features

  • Easy-to-use PDF security remover, helping decrypt PDF protections and restrictions on printing, editing and copying.

  • Enables you to add text or image watermarks to PDF documents to protect your PDF pages from plagiarism.

  • Compress bulky PDFs and shrink its size and send compact documents to your partners or colleagues.

If you want to know more features of PDF Reader Pro, you can click the hyperlink to get more details. PDF Reader Pro provides a free trial for you, you can also click the 'Free Download' button to get this free PDF editor Mac. 


Apple Preview

Apple Preview is a pretty goodfree PDF editor Mac, it is already installed on your Mac. If you just want to fill in some text on your PDF file, Apple Preview is a good choice although it has some limitations.

Preview enables you to add text, and you can change the size, color, font of the text. You can also perform actions like strikethrough and underline. Adding comments in the form of sticky notes is also supported. Adding or deleting pages from PDF in Preview is easy. It is also easy to rotate pages, rearrange their order or combine two different PDFs into one document. You can convert your PDF to JPEG and TIFF, if you want to convert your PDF to Word, Excel, PowerPoint or another format, Preview doesn't help you.

From the above, if all you need to do is enter a bit of text, Preview is likely to be sufficient. If you need more complex functions, you need a more professional PDF editor Mac.

best free PDF editor for Mac Apple Preview


Adobe Reader DC

Adobe Acrobat Reader is a powerful PDF reader, and it is free. But some of the features aren’t free, if you want to use those features, you need to move to the Pro tier. Adobe Acrobat Reader Pro comes with a monthly, annual or prepaid annual subscription and you need to pay up front.

Some features are available for free, such as Comment and Fill & Sign sections. If you want to add text to the PDF, you can choose Fill & Sign. Comment options include the ability to add a speech bubble, highlight, underline, and strike-through words. There are also tools here to draw and erase what you draw.

best free PDF editor for Mac Adobe Reader DC


PDFelement

PDFelement is a PDF tool developed by Wondershare. With the PDFelement you can create new PDFs, convert PDF to Word, Excel or PowerPoint files, annotate PDF and edit PDF. You can edit PDF with tools for adding text or comments, annotating images and documents, plus the standard option of inserting a signature created on the trackpad.

You can have a free trial if you want to give it a test run, but all saved files will be restricted by the inclusion of a watermark. And you are only able to open a maximum of three pages PDFs, files created via OCR will not be saved.

If you don't want to be limited to free features, you need to pay $69 for PDFelement Standard, $79 for PDFelement Pro.

best free PDF editor for Mac PDFelement


PDF Expert for Mac

PDF Expert for Mac was developed by Readdle. It has the advantage in maintaining the fonts, style and formatting of the original PDF.

This PDF Editor Mac supports annotate and edit. Under Annotate you will easily add text to the PDF and the font and color of the text can be changed. Options to highlight, underline, or strike-through text, as well as a pan tool are all available. And you can also add sticky notes and stamps. Under Edit, you can edit text, add images, add hyperlinks, and redact other information. Adding a signature is also easy. To add the signature to your PDF just drag and drop from the signature pane.

The weakness of PDF Expert is that we can’t export the PDF into Word or Excel. PDF Expert provides a seven-day trial, if you need to use it longer, you need to pay up $79.99.

best free PDF editor for Mac PDF Expert for Mac


FindReader Pro for Mac

The greatest highlight of FindReader Pro for Mac is OCR (optical character recognition). If you want to edit a straightforward PDF, this application probably wouldn’t do for you. But when you need to edit scanned text from a book or a printout, this is the app for you. This application supports you to export PDF to Word or Pages, so you can edit it. But the resulting Word document was a little muddled, some of the words are mistakes.

This application needs to pay $139.99 if you want a long-term usage. And it provides the 30-day free trial version.

best free PDF editor for Mac FindReader Pro for Mac


Foxit PhantomPDF Mac

Foxit PhantomPDF offers diverse PDF editing features. These include the annotation and viewing of PDFs and participation in annotating, reading, reviewing and sharing files. Other Foxit PhantomPDF features include signing and protecting PDFs, PDF files modification, compressing, scanning and OCR functionalities, creating and organizing PDFs and more.

Foxit PhantomPDF for Mac provides a free trial, if you want a life-time service, you need to pay $139.

best free PDF editor for Mac Foxit PhantomPDF


PDFpen Pro

The operating experience of PDFpenPro is similar to that of Preview since it keeps the original operation processing feature of Preview. But it also has functional enhancements, different from Preview, you can sign on PDF, add text and images, make changes, correct typos, perform OCR on scanned documents and more. It also enables you to fill and create fillable forms. Converting PDF to Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats are also supported.

The downside of PDFpenPro is that it doesn't support all languages, such as Chinese. And editing text and page on PDF is relatively weaker than another professional PDF editor. The price of this application is $124.95, and you have a free trial.

best free PDF editor for Mac PDFpen Pro


PDFescape Online PDF Editor

If you want to edit a smaller PDF file, PDFescape Online PDF Editor is a good option. But the desktop application is only for Windows. Mac users can use it online. With PDFescape, you can either edit online, and the online version is free to use. 

You can get plenty of useful PDF editing options with PDFescape online. You are able to make freehand notes and a tool for adding clickable URL links to your documents. You also can add, rotate, and annotate pages with the in-browser version of PDFescape.

The free PDF editor Mac has a disadvantage: you can’t upload documents that are larger than 10MB.

best free PDF editor for Mac PDFescape Online PDF Editor


Smallpdf

Smallpdf is an online PDF tool, and if you want to edit PDF files offline, you can install the Smallpdf Desktop program. Smallpdf provides many features for users to choose from, you can edit PDF, compress PDF, convert PDF to Word, Excel and other easier-to-edit formats. Merging, rotating, splitting, unlocking PDF are also supported.

But Smallpdf’s editing feature is a little weak, it just allows users to add text, image and shape on PDF, which means that you can't directly edit text on PDF, and you also can't annotate PDF.

best free PDF editor for Mac Smallpdf


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