SmileOnMyMac Blog

Gordon Meyer, author of Smart Home Hacks, wrote an article entitled “My Paperless Office” which appeared on his blog and the O’Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog. He writes about how he has been using his Fujitsu ScanSnap500M Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner.

It sounds pretty cool how he’s managed to eliminate 3 boxes of stored paper. He uses DevonThink Pro Office to catalog and manage the PDFs, and PDFpen is part of the workflow too:

I normally use Skim to view PDFs, but while scanning I prefer PDFPen instead. It’s the perfect tool for this task because it lets me rearrange and delete pages within the finished PDF.

Gordon is also the contributor of one of our most popular TextExpander tips, on using the clipboard built-in macro.

Tom from West Virginia sent us this tip:

I’m a college English instructor, and I now use PDFpen to mark my essays. I’ve added some of the common English correction marks to the Scribbles palette of my Library and just drag them over to where they’re needed in the student’s essay.

I’ve found that by taking time to make my marks more legible, the Scribbles are much more readable than my own on paper copies. Too, the students now have permanent digital copies of all their written work which they can still print if they wish.

It’s easier for me and students are much happier, too. And think of all the red ink I’ve saved, not to mention paper! The other editing tools with PDFpen are also very useful.

I decided to get a photo of PDFpen in the Apple Store–at the same time as I picked up an iPhone.

It was a fairly painless experience. My buddy Edward and I went over to Pioneer Place mall in downtown Portland at around 2 pm, and we were about 80th in line. What stunned me is that within a half an hour of the store opening at 6 pm, we had our iPhones and were out the door. The Apple Store was quick!

A few more photos are posted on Flickr.

So far, I think the iPhone is really neat! The activation via iTunes was a model of user-friendliness. Everything works pretty much as advertised. What would really make it great is some excellent third-party software programs.

We got this email from BJ Strass, the publisher of Scooter Rider:

I finally am getting around to letting you know how much PDFpen has helped me out. It has saved me countless hours of reworking and reformatting prior PDFs. I produce a small magazine and after 4 years we decided to offer full year Journals — all the issues for each year in a formatted paperback book available through Lulu.com.

The problem was that over the years we used 3 types of software in the layout, different image formats, and some variation in size format. I tried no less than 6 pieces of software and many, many methods and it began to look like we were either going to abandon the project, due to time, or redo all layout from scratch, then I stumbled on PDFpen. Rather than having to redo everything we did a ‘tune-up’ on each issue in its relative layout software, printed each issue as a PDF, then combined, resized and arranged the entire year in PDFpen. It was great! I give the gang at SmileOnMyMac my grateful appreciation. If you are interested you can see the store at www.lulu.com/bj1056

Thanks again for making a great piece of very useful software, that like a Mac, it just works well.

Our thanks go to BJ for sharing his PDFpen experience–and a copy of TextExpander too! Send your user tips to jean@smileonmymac.com; if we post your tip, you’ll get a complimentary copy of any of our products.

I stumbled in college on a class called Multivariable Calculus, and never took another math class, so I cannot pretend to have come up with this tip myself. John from Stanford sent this in:

For a long time I’ve wanted to be able to add math margin notes to a PDF. With OS X’s PDF-based display, this seemed like it should be possible, but Acrobat doesn’t do it. It cannot accept PDFs that are drag/dropped or pasted. I was even considering writing some tool to do it, but I found the way: a combination of LaTeX Equation Editor (free, great with Keynote) and PDFpen.

With these two programs, you can type LaTeX into LaTeX Equation Editor, then drag-and-drop the resulting mini PDF onto your PDF in PDFpen, resize it there, and save. [sample below]

One caveat is that PDFpen has to be in pointer mode or have most recently used the insert-image-or-PDF button; if it’s in scribble or other annotation mode it does not accept the drop.

Nowadays, most of my knowledge of complex mathematical equations comes from watching the (improbable but entertaining) TV show NUMB3RS, but the tip itself made sense to me.

Here’s a tip from Jean in Portland, Oregon: (yeah, that’s actually me…)

If you are filling out a form using PDFpen’s Text tool, you can do it a lot faster if you double-click the Text tool before starting. By default, the Text tool reverts to the Select tool after each use. Double-clicking overrides this behavior. The Text tool will stay active and you’ll be able to fill out the whole form without switching back and forth between tools.

As a member of the SmileOnMyMac team, I’m not eligible for the thank-you gift we offer to customers whose user tips we post. Send me your PDFpen tips at jean@smileonmymac.com; if we use your tip, you get your choice of any one of our six terrific applications!

Mark, a doctor in Texas, had a great idea about watermarking documents:

Watermarking a PDF is an awesome feature. In the past I’ve needed to send out my C.V. as a PDF to different agencies, but then they would broadcast fax my C.V. to facilities where I might already be working, irritating the agency with whom I’ve already contracted. Custom watermarking the PDF allows me to attribute to which agency the C.V. came from.

How do you do it with PDFpen? Here are the instructions that Greg sent to Mark:

A watermark can be an imprint, scribble, piece of text, or even an image with transparency.

For example, with a PDF open in PDFpen, drag an image to watermark with onto the first page and position it how you like. Next, choose “Imprint All Pages as First” from the Script menu (right end of PDFpen menu bar), and the watermark will be applied to every page. Note that you can also make a graphic transparent by opening the Properties window, and clicking the color button, and adjusting the Opacity slider, so this way text can show through behind the watermark graphic.

Awesome, indeed. Thanks, Mark, for pointing out another great way to use PDFpen!

On October 19, 2005, Yunor and I went to dinner at Philip’s new place in San Francisco (he had just moved down from Portland a month before). On our way home, we found was a parking ticket for $50 for having parked for more than two hours in a particular spot. The ticket claimed we had been parked since 4:12pm, which was impossible as we had not arrived until 6:45pm.

Driving home to Berkeley, it occurred to me that I could even prove that we were not parked in San Francisco for two hours starting at 4:12pm because we used FasTrack to pay the bridge toll at 6:00pm. I’m opposed to FasTrack data being used prosecutorially — either secretly by law enforcement or openly by zealous divorce lawyers — but I think it’s okay to be used defensively and by the one who generated the data point in the first place. So I enclosed with my letter to the city a printout from my account page on the FasTrack website indicating that I crossed the Bay Bridge, and therefore was not parked in San Francisco, at 6:00pm.

Months passed. Every two months I received a letter from the City of San Francisco (posted first class at a cost to the dear citizens of the City) informing me that they had not gotten around to reviewing my case but that they would in due course. In April 2006, I got a letter indicating that my letter of protest had been reviewed and that the citation was valid. If I wished to protest further, I must pay the fine and either appear in person or request a hearing by mail. So I paid, ginned up a new cover letter, enclosing copies of all correspondence so far, and made my request.

The correspondence continued. I received a note indicating that the citation had been dismissed because the owner of the vehicle had paid the fine and therefore my request for a hearing was also dismissed. At first, I figured this meant I would get a refund, but after re-reading the letter a few times, I realized that they meant because I had paid the fine, there would be no hearing. Sigh.

I wrote yet another letter explaining that I was the one who had paid the fine (in accordance with the City’s instructions) and that I very much desired the hearing. I also noted that if the outcome of the hearing was that the ticket was dismissed, I would like a refund of my $50.

I’m writing this blog entry to celebrate the “Notice of Parking Violation Hearing Decision” I received yesterday. The city says I’ll get my refund in 1-2 weeks and that “no further action is required.”

Throughout this process, PDFpen proved invaluable, as I was able to paste together disparate documents: the ticket from my scanner, the FasTrack page from Safari, and my own letters hastily written in TextEdit. I was also able to apply my signature and to keep records of my correspondence.

It’s a shame that the San Francisco Department of Parking & Traffic doesn’t do E-mail, as that would have saved the City of San Francisco and me a fair amount of time and postage. I suppose it’s also a shame they don’t use PDFpen, but surely that is not lost on you, dear reader.