Free software to write on PDFs with my tablet?

October 21, 2008 1:55 PM

PDF editing software for Mac to use with my Wacom tablet?

I recently bought a Wacom Bamboo tablet thinking it would revolutionize my graduate school research by allowing me to write directly on PDF documents without having to print them out.

Does anyone know of software that exists to allow me to write directly on PDF documents, and save them in their original format.

I know about Skim but that doesn't work to draw directly on the page.

FormulatePro starts to get at what I want, but any documents you write on are saved in the ".formulate". I know I can print to PDF, which is better than nothing, but it's an annoying step that I'd like to avoid if I can.

It seems like PDFpen and PDFclerk do what I want, but I'd prefer NOT to pay $50 after having spent $70 on the tablet.

Does any freeware or really cheap (<20$) software exist to do this?

posted by jk252b to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

You'd think that this would be really easy to find--but it ain't. However, there's a happy solution: lots of Mac image editing programs can open PDF files as images, let you mark them up--and then save them as PDFs. (Here's an example.)

My hands-down favorite is Skitch. But I also use Seashore or other programs.
posted by bnwklr at 2:24 PM on October 21, 2008

Response by poster: Yeah, I have CS3 and thought of using just using Illustrator for this purpose. But it's a bit of a heavy-duty program to be using for just reading pdfs. Maybe something a more lightweight vector editor would be good though.
posted by jk252b at 8:23 PM on October 21, 2008