Earlier this year, I reviewed PDF Expert version 6 and said that it was my new favorite app for working with PDF files. I didn't realize at the time that Readdle was just a few months away from releasing PDF Expert version 7. Although I have encountered a few problems with this new version, overall I like it quite a bit, and PDF Expert continues to be my PDF app of choice, although I still have other PDF apps on my iPad and I use them from time to time. Here are my thoughts on what is changed.
Customize the Toolbar
My favorite new feature in PDF Expert is the ability to customize the toolbar. One of the main things that I do with this app is read and annotate documents — such as briefs filed by an opponent, cases downloaded from Westlaw or Lexis, exhibits, contracts, etc.
There are four main tabs in the middle of the top of the app: Annotate, Draw, Insert, and Favorites. Those first three tabs include the tools most often associated with those tasks, but I never use those tabs in the app. That's because the fourth tab, called Favorites, is far more useful than the other tabs. In the Favorites tab, you can create your own toolbar.
This feature has made up so much faster to use the app because every tool that I would ever want to use is right there at the top, and the tools that I never use don't waste any space up there. I currently have my tools set up so that the first three tools are fine point pens (black, blue, red) with a 1 point thickness. Then, as a separator, I have the highlight tool — a tool that I use all the time. Next, I have five medium point pens with a 1.5 point thickness, and I have five colors: black, blue, red, green, and purple. Toolbars in other PDF apps typically only give you two or three colors by default; to access more colors, you have to dig into sub-menus, which requires extra steps so I normally just skip it. But now that green and purple are just as easy for me to access as black, blue, and red, I find myself using those other two colors much more often as I'm annotating documents. And I'll often use different colors to mean different things, so my annotations become even more valuable to me. Also, the ability to have easy access to pens of different thickness is very nice.
My next tools on my Favorites toolbar are underline, insert a text box, erase, add a box, add a line, and add an arrow.
My final two favorite tools deserve a little explanation. The Photos tool can be used to insert a photo into a PDF file. Why would I want to do that? No, I'm not adding pictures from a family vacation to my work documents. Instead, I'm often using this for a document-in-document feature. Sometimes I want to take a part of another document and place it right next to something in this document. For example, when I'm reviewing a Petition, I might want to grab a paragraph from a contract and place it right there next to the relevant paragraph in the Petition. I can open the contract, take a picture of the screen, then insert that picture into the Petition document and crop the image so that it only shows the relevant language from the contract.
My final tool is a yellow marker. When I'm working with files that are OCR'd, I instead use the highlight tool, which works much better. But if I have a document that doesn't have readable text, I can use the marker to highlight.
If I ever decide to customize this toolbar even more, it is easy to do so. You can select which tools are there and change the order.
If the customizable toolbar were the only new feature in PDF Expert version 7, that alone would be enough reason for me to recommend this app to other attorneys. The new toolbar makes it so much easier to annotate documents. I love it.
Reduce PDF File Size
Sometimes you want to share a PDF file with someone else but the file is too large to attach to an email, and perhaps even too large to be a reasonable download using a file sharing service such as Dropbox or Citrix ShareFile. PDF Expert version 7 gives you the ability to compress a PDF file.
You are given the option to use four different document quality sessions, and the app tells you how much smaller a file will be at each setting. Lossless is often a great option to make a file a little bit smaller but just as legible. High and Medium are also pretty good, depending upon the document itself. I never use the Low setting because I find that it reduces the document quality too much, although it can give you a very small file size.
With some documents, the reduce file size option doesn't help at all. With some documents, you get the same file size reduction with two or more of the quality settings. It all just depends upon the document that you are working with. Nevertheless, it is nice to have this option, and I especially like that you can see what the new file size will be before you even perform the operation. And if you don't like how the document looks after you do so, just tap the undo button to go back to the prior version of the document.
User interface tweaks
Throughout the app, you'll notice numerous changes to the user interface, most of which I think are for the better. For example, the new Search interface is better, giving you more context when you search for words in a document and buttons that make it easy to jump to the next instance of a word. You can also customize many aspects of the interface of the app, such as which options appear on the left when you are in the file browser mode.
Along with the improvements, however, I also see some bizarre behavior, which I suppose is a bug. When I am looking at a list of files, if I tap an item in the list to open that document – such as the third item from the top — for a fraction of a second before the document opens the first two items in the list disappear and the other items in the list move up. My document does then open, but that bizarre behavior often leads me to believe that I tapped on the wrong item in the list. I hope that this can be fixed soon.
Convert to PDF
The app now gives you the ability to convert images, Word files, and Excel files into PDF files. For Microsoft Office files, I typically just use the Word or Excel apps on my iPad to convert to PDF, but it is nice to have another tool that can do this.
Speed
Readdle says that PDF Expert version 7 is much faster because it takes advantage of Apple's new Metal technology. I agree that the app does a nice job of working with huge PDF files.
On the other hand, when I'm browsing through lists of files and folders that I have synced to the app from Dropbox, I find that the app sometimes hangs for a second or two. I think that this might be part of the sync process. It's annoying, and I've alerted Readdle to the issue. Again, hopefully this can be fixed in a future update because version 6 never did this.
Pricing
The app pricing has changed. When reviewed PDF expert earlier this year, the app cost $9.99 and for an additional $9.99 you could unlock the ability to edit a PDF file. Now, the app is free, but to enable many of the features I described above — design your own toolbar, reduce PDF file size, and convert to PDF — you need to pay for a PRO subscription, which costs $50/year. I consider the cost of a PRO subscription worth it just for the custom toolbar feature; I use this app virtually every single day at work, so I see the benefit of a better toolbar multiple times a day, every day. But if you are not sure whether you will want the advanced features, just download the free version of the app and try it out. If you previously used version 6 of the app and paid to unlock some of the advanced features such as edit PDF text, when you upgrade to version 7 you will still have those features even if you decide not to purchase the PRO version to access the new features.
Conclusion
Aside from the two bugs that I noted above, I'm very happy with PDF Expert version 7. The app makes it easy to organize, read, and annotate PDF files. And if you pay for the PRO subscription to access the new custom toolbar feature, annotating documents is faster and easier than ever. Every lawyer who wants to make serious use of an iPad in a law practice needs a good PDF management app, and PDF Expert is an excellent choice.
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