PDF Pen Does OCR and Bates Stamping

Posted by EsquireMac in Applications, Trial Prep on Dec 1st, 2008 | 4 comments
A couple of months ago, Smile On My Mac updated their PDF Pen and PDF Pen Pro applications from version 3 to version 4.  Our pal, Peter Summerill at MacLitigator, broke the news of that release here. With PDF Pen’s update to 4.0, the application gained Optical Character Recognition (OCR) functionality. Our firm decided to purchase the PDF Pen Pro app. We opted for the Pro version because it allows you to create fillable forms – a nice feature that Apple’s Preview does not provide. OCR I have used the OCR functionality of PDF Pen several times since we purchased the application. This...
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More on ScanTango and Redacting PDFs

Posted by EsquireMac in Applications, PDF on Aug 10th, 2008 | 3 comments
After my post about redacting PDFs without Adobe, Craig Landrum, the author of ScanTango sent me an excellent email. With his permission, I am posting his comments for your benefit. I’m the author of ScanTango and I really appreciate the nice mention of the application in your blog. Some feedback on redaction: When most applications redact, they simply put an opaque white or (more typically) black rectangle over the sensitive areas of the document. In most PDF software what this actually does is simply creates an opaque rectangular image object that sits above what is being redacted (whether...
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Redact Your PDFs Without Adobe

Posted by EsquireMac in PDF on Aug 6th, 2008 | 1 comment
As you may have noticed from my previous post about PDFs, for reasons spelled out there, I’m not a big fan of Adobe. I recently had occasion to produce several hundred pages of discovery. After bates stamping the documents, I had to redact some handwritten notes from the client to myself as they were privileged communications. There are multiple ways to redact PDF documents on a Mac. Here are a couple that I found useful. PDFPen and PDFPen Pro have tools that allow you to select an area and have it fill with black.  PDFPen is $50 and PDFPen Pro is $95. There is no difference between the Pro and...
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Bates Stamp PDFs on a Mac

Posted by EsquireMac in PDF on Jul 6th, 2008 | 2 comments
I’ve been in search of a freeware method for adding bates numbers to PDF files on the Mac.  Well, there’s no such thing, as of this writing.  I’ve searched high and low to find a free method for bates stamping PDF documents on a Mac, and, quite frankly, I’ve struck out. Fortunately, I run Windows XP via VM Ware Fusion and I found what I believe to be the only freeware solution out there for bates stamping PDF documents: Windows or Mac. (For those of you who aren’t lawyers or otherwise don’t know what bates stamping is, it basically means page numbering.) That...
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