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For many professional-based businesses — such as accounting, law, and realty firms — PDFs are a necessary evil. PDFs happen to be one of the best and most universal ways to send a document to another person. Almost any computing device can view them, and they will almost always display as intended — with formatting and layout intact — across all manner of platforms and devices.

We spend an inordinate amount of time sorting through hundreds of apps to find the very best. Our team here at The Sweet Setup put together a short list of our must-have, most-used apps in These apps work on iPad, iPhone, and Mac. And they range across several different categories but are mostly focused on productivity.

They will help you get the most out of your devices and your day. Get the List ». For our testing, we included both paid and free apps that were popular or recommended. Many apps have been discontinued since or have seen major updates. The apps we tested include:. We also utilized a page general ledger PDF document as a dummy unit for testing document merge speeds.

There were many apps that could do almost every task, but often fell short in one or more tests — most notably in the merging and form-filling tests.

Through numerous review iterations, PDF Expert has surprised us time and again — the last time this review was updated, PDF Expert introduced a new categorical feature all by itself. Of course, nearly all the best PDF apps on the iPad can now perform basic and even complex document merges. But none of them do it for free, do it as fast, and do it as simply as PDF Expert.

In talking with many iPad PDF users, a common theme ran throughout: The most important features of a PDF management app are organization , annotation , and reading. PDF Expert 6 offers the best of class in all three of those categories, and adds yet another: editing. Many of the other apps we tested hide common user tasks with gestures and tap zones the user must somehow learn and remember.

PDF Expert tries to avoid taps and buttons where it can by clearly labeling things where needed and tailoring the gestures intuitively based on the view the user has chosen in the app. PDF Expert makes it easy to tap-hold-and-drag a file to perform actions on it — no need to find the Select button formerly Edit.

Once an app is tapped and held, PDF Expert shrinks the left sidebar options down to folders available for moving. Like everything else in PDF Expert, moving files around is extremely quick and easy. Side note: Dragging a PDF file on top of another creates a folder, which is shown via the files changing into a folder icon nice touch , but we would love to be able to toggle this action into a merging action.

Dragging one PDF file onto another to merge the two together would be a better use for this action; after all, folders can always be created by tapping the new folder icon. When you do find yourself tapping the Select button, be prepared to smile if working with PDFs is a large part of your life. As expected, tapping this button allows you to select multiple files to act on. However, it also opens up a new set of options in the sidebar, including:.

Not all of these features are unique to PDF Expert, but it was the only app we tested with all of the features together in one app. The most elusive to other apps are the tagging, zipping, and merging features. Even at that, many other apps simply did not perform these actions as easily as PDF Expert does.

One of our contributors works in an accounting office and constantly uses PDF Expert on the iPad to merge files and create outlines for PDFs — both workflows on the Mac require separate apps, additional in-app purchases, and a surprising amount of computing horsepower to complete.

Though specialized apps do exist for this specific task, we are trying to find a good all-in-one PDF solution. We also tried both merging methods with a page method. In both cases, PDF Expert handled the task quickly and without hiccups. While viewing a document, tap either one from the top-hand toolbar to select that mode. When it comes to annotations, PDF Expert has always had the most feature-rich highlighting engine in our testing.

Offering very opaque coloring and dark colors makes it one of the few apps tested that allow you to easily redact lines of text using a black highlight, but do note that you need to flatten the PDF if you want it to remain redacted when shared.

This is something the NSA should probably look into. Annotations are also done very well when moved from platform to platform. Creation of those annotations is also a simple task. Handwritten annotations using the Apple Pencil are also best in the business. There are options for adjusting tip sensitivity, enabling you to hand-write with variable line thickness, just like with physical pen and paper. Highlighting, underlining, and strikethrough tools can all be applied easily with the Pencil as well.

Another nice trick: When using the Pencil, your fingertip is used for navigation while the Pencil is used for annotation. The small nature of the note bubble can make for rather tricky placement with a finger. PDF Expert also boasts solid signature support. Our only complaint is the thickest line thickness is still a little thin for many forms. It used to be that you could only stow one signature in PDF Expert. PDF Expert allows you to switch between vertical and horizontal scrolling modes, both of which perform admirably.

You can also view PDFs in two-page mode. This is great for providing an overview of a specific section in a PDF, and is doubly good on the largest The two-page viewing mode gets a little cramped on the inch iPad Pro, but will do the job in a pinch.

This is helpful for providing larger text when viewing in two-page mode on an inch iPad Pro, but otherwise eliminates margins where many tend to create annotations.

The voice reads quite slow by default, so make sure to tap on the gear icon and speed up the voice a little. Pushing the speed all the way to the hare end of the spectrum is ridiculously fast — somewhere right in the middle should do for most people. Overall, the reading experience is solid, offering one of the fastest renderings of large PDF files we tested.

In other words, no matter what your office uses, you can probably sync your documents in the app. Readdle has also created a secure and fast way to transfer PDFs from your iPad to your Mac and vice versa when both devices are connected to the same local network. Enter the code into the site on your Mac and watch as your Mac and iPad instantly connect to one another. Opening PDFs on the Mac is lightning quick and can be viewed right in the browser, or can be downloaded locally to your Mac.

The app also allows you to enable iOS Data Protection file-encryption system. A very powerful one actually. It's basically a advanced file manager with PDF functionality on top of it. Now as for a simple PDF editor, the native Files app technically qualifies. You can very easily make highlights, comments, and hand-written notes. Last edited by Dylrob; at PM. Originally Posted by Dylrob. Originally Posted by peaceridge. If GoodReader had a free trial, I'd try it.

Given that I don't know how it crops margins, Bookari allows for cropping margins and has a free version. I can't tell the difference between the paid and free one and it's not a very good ereader on IOS I like the Android version, though , but it works nicely cropping margins in pdf's for me. I know a lot of PDF readers let you automatically crop out margins, but while this will account for pre-defined margins, it won't work for scanned pages, nor will it let you crop out headers and footers.

What I like about GoodReader is that it lets you manually define the area you want to crop out. Originally Posted by Marinolino. Zoom-locking should work on scans also, either on the scanned pages without ocr layer or with ocr layer behind the page image so that text can be highlighted, copied and searched. In Goodreader, newer Foxit etc. Thanks, Foxit has everything what I want! Although I see its one of those apps that uses a shared codebase for iOS and Android Last edited by Marinolino; at PM.

PDF Viewer 2. Give Readdle Documents a try. All times are GMT The time now is PM. Mark Forums Read. User Name. Remember Me?