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 comes in very handy for me when answering Interrogatories, where, in Maryland, you must retype the questions when drafting your answers. Overall, I’d say it works better than I expected. It is not perfect. When copying and pasting the text, I find that I have to correct a lot of hard returns. I have yet to run into OCR software that is anywhere close to perfect. This may well be as good as anything presently on the market. Aside from some formatting issues (like the hard returns), I must say that I have been impressed with its accuracy at recognizing characters. Based on statistics that I just made up, I put it’s accuracy at about 99.95%.

The OCR engine used by PDF Pen is Tesseract, which is an old open source OCR project that was purchased by Google in the last year or so and turned into a Google Code project. According to Google:

(As a side note, I came across Tesseract a couple of years ago while searching for a free OCR solution for the Mac. I was not successful in finding a good end-user solution, but I did find Tesseract. I was intrigued by its existence, but by far lacked the know-how to download the source code and do anything useful with it – not that I didn’t try. I am happy to see that it has picked up some steam and is being put to good use by some folks who know what they’re doing.)

Bates Stamping

Two to three weeks after we purchased the application, we got an email notifying us that there was a free update available for PDF Pen. Their email said:

Hi ,

Just wanted to let you know that PDFpen 4.0.2 and PDFpenPro 4.0.2 have just been released. The update adds Bates numbering (popular for legal documents) to the AppleScript menu.

Aside from what is included in Adobe Acrobat Professional for the Mac, Bates stamping options have been limited for the Mac. I wrote about Bates stamping on a Mac several months ago here, and concluded that the best option for a Mac user was actually to use a free Windows program called A-PDF Number.

I have used the Bates stamping functionality of PDF Pen several times since we purchased it.

As their email stated, the Bates stamping functionality is implemented via the AppleScript menu.

When you select the Bates numbering script, a window appears asking for your prefix.

This is the result.

Because it places the stamp in the same place on every page, there may be times where the Bates stamp obscures some important part of the document. Fortunately, it is possible to drag the stamp to a different location on any given page. Unfortunately, however, there is no way to relocate the Bates stamp en masse. This could mean a lot of manual dragging if you have a lot of pages that will be obscured by the stamp.

This is certainly a welcome enhancement to the functionality of the program, and we had decided to purchase it before it was even added. That said, while I’m grateful for its inclusion, it could be improved.

What could be improved?

Placement. It might be helpful to be able to specify from the outset a few parameters for where the stamp should go (e.g., bottom-left, bottom-middle, bottom-right; 0.25 inches from edge; etc.).

Specify Starting Number. In addition to specifying a prefix, it would be nice to be able to resume a series from where the last one left off. I know that you could simply specify a different prefix, but “I’m just sayin’ is all.”

All in all, I’m happy to have the application, and if I really get ambitious, maybe I’ll make it a part of my workflow to OCR every document that gets scanned into our office. Better yet, maybe I’ll train one of our wonderful assistants to do it for me!

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 that is portions of an image or actual selectable text). This allows “PDF hackers” to dig below the obscuring layer you just applied to get to the original stuff beneath. For this reason, ScanTango provides a “Convert to Bitmap” function. This function creates an bitmap image into which it draws the PDF page you convert, creating a pure, non-layered bitmap with everything on a single image plane. Because the layers are removed in this plane, PDF hackers have nothing they can dig into. The newly created bitmap plane replaces the original (perhaps text-based) page in the PDF document. This means that the text on that page will no longer be selectable.

Printing to a PDF via Apples print dialog may or may not do this type of conversion (I have not tested this). One way to check is to print a text-based PDF via Apple’s print dialog and see if the output PDF still contains selectable text. If it does, you haven’t hidden anything and are still vulnerable.

ScanTango takes the brute force method to solve this problem as I described above, assuring you that what you intend to hide is really, really, hidden

In our latest version, we allow potential buyers to try the app with their own hardware. Until the application is registered, all pages that are scanned have a gentle registration reminder stamped on them. However, existing PDFs that you input and redact will not have this warning, so for people that just want to redact existing PDFs, it’s a free tool (a nice word to your legal friends above the app would be appreciated though).

Thanks, Craig! I definitely feel better about redacting live-text PDFs with ScanTango after you explained what’s up.

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 the regular version in terms of this functionality. Using PDFPen in demo mode, because I haven’t paid for a license, the program inserts a watermark on your documents. Obviously, this is not suitable for use in litigation.

That’s why I chose to use ScanTango. ScanTango is a pretty usable application I came across. It costs $99 or $149, depending on the type of scanner you have to work with.  I found the redaction tool worked pretty well. Actually, it even seemed to muck up the text in a live pdf document so you couldn’t copy what was under the redaction. Here’s what they have to say about it:

There are times when you may wish to send a document to a colleage, but need to selectively protect sensitive information. The solution is redaction. ScanTango allows you to select any area of a TIFF or PDF page and either Erase (white out) or Redact (black out) areas. And for you PDF-savvy lawyers out there, ScanTango even allows you to convert those hackable PDF pages into non-hackable flat Bitmap pages before saving and sending the document, so nobody can hack beneath your redactions..

Source.

I can’t say how much I’d trust this feature with sensitive live text. I scanned all of my documents to PDF with no OCR before I did my redaction. Then, I printed to PDF to add one more layer of separation to make sure nobody could see what was behind the redactions.

So far as I can tell, ScanTango doesn’t impose many limitations on the demo mode of its software. There are other ways to redact PDFs on a Mac without using Satan Adobe, but these are the simplest I have found. I’m actually kind of bummed there’s no freeware or open source way to do this – or to bates stamp PDFs for that matter. These tasks seem simple enough. I don’t understand why the only tools to do these kinds of things cost from $50 to hundreds. Heck, I’d even settle for a $10 or $20 solution, but there’s no way I’m paying hundreds for these simple tasks.  Oh yeah, it’s because rich lawyers are about the only ones who need this kind of stuff. Got it, nevermind.

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 freeware solution is A-PDF Number from A-PDF: Affordable PDF Tools. You can download it free from the link provided.

As I have disclaimed in my About page, I use Windows when I have to – and sometimes I have to.  Technically, I don’t have to, but why pay for something when you can do it for free.  Call me cheap, but I refuse to pay $400-$500 for Adobe Professional when the only thing I need it for is putting page numbers on PDFs.  Certainly, there are Mac programs that will allow you to do this simple task, but, in my opinion, they are vastly over-priced. Here is a breakdown of the programs I’ve found for the Mac that will do the job.

PDF Studio: ($60) – PDF Studio’s website claims that you can add “page numbers and more,” but I couldn’t find out how.  Certainly you can manually do that, but I’m in search of an automated solution. This is especially important when you have hundreds or thousands of documents to control.

Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro ($449) – I’m told Acrobat 8 Pro has a very usable page numbering feature. I assume the new Acrobat 9 Pro has at least the same functionality. I have not tried it out. Personally, I hate Adobe’s Reader.  It’s bloated and slow and doesn’t really give me any useful functionality.  I can only imagine that Adobe’s professional PDF machine is more bloated.  Plus, $450 is too much to pay for the only thing I need from it: page numbering (although, although the OCR that comes with Acrobat could come in handy, too… more on that in a later post). I’m not alone in my hatred for Adobe Reader: see here and here.

PDF Stamp ($20) – This program does allow you to add page numbers, but they end up right at the very edge of the page, which means that they get cut off when printing.  Also, this program is supposedly from Blitztools, but their website makes no mention of it.  There is a program called PDF Stamp for Windows from verypdf.com, so perhaps Blitztools surrendered the name?  Anyway, I’m assuming the application has been abandoned by its developers.  You can still find it here from download.com.  You can download a 30 day trial, but I’m not sure how you’d buy a license when the trial has expired – I’ve looked.

PDF Pen ($50) Allows you to insert page numbers into PDFs but, so far as I can tell, (1) it only allows you to stick the page number at the bottom left corner, (2) the page numbers have to start at one, and (3) you cannot automatically prefix the page numbers.  This would not be very useful for bates stamping large numbers of files in numerous batches.

PDF Pen Pro ($95) So far as I can tell, PDF Pen Pro does not improve upon the page numbering functionality of PDF Pen.

As you can see, the options for bates stamping PDFs on a Mac are limited. You can have a $450 application that does a good job – but it costs $450, or you can spend less on any of several applications that don’t do this job very well.

That’s why I think, so far, A-PDF is the best solution.  I already spent the $80 on VM Ware Fusion, and I had a copy of Windows XP that I bought from my law school’s book store for $5 or $10.

As you can see from the picture below, you simply choose the document you would like to bates stamp, choose the page number to start, choose to prefix each page number with whatever you wish and click the Process button, and you’re done.

And, here is the result.  Simple, easy, free.

There are other great PDF tools for the Mac, both free and paid, but, so far as I can tell, none of them allow for page numbering in any sort of automated fashion. That said, some of the applications mentioned in this post may be well suited for other tasks, but those are not the subject of this post.