We’ve been listening to your requests, PDFpenPro users! PDFpenPro 5.2.3 can now automate the creation of PDFs from web pages via AppleScript. Here’s an example:
tellapplication “PDFpenPro”
activate
settheDoctomakenewdocumentwith data “http://smilesoftware.com” with properties {levels:2, top margin:36, bottom margin:36, right margin:36, left margin:36, follow:server, maximum pages:100}
endtell
The return value is the created document.
You’ll find additional information on converting HTML to PDF with PDFpenPro in the PDFpenPro help.
You can upgrade from PDFpen to PDFpenPro for US $40. In addition to being able to convert websites to multi-page PDFs, you’ll also be able to create cross-platform fillable forms and to construct document table of contents with PDFpenPro.
“If you use PDFpen/PDFpenPro on multiple Macs, you can sync the Library using Dropbox. The trick is in how you get PDFpen to find the Library when it’s in your Dropbox and not where it normally expects it. You do that with a symlink. Both PDFpen and PDFpenPro use the same Library location (good thinking on that Smile), ~/Library/Application Support/PDFpen.
“The only real trick here is symlink creation. For that I like to use an OSX service called SymbolicLinker. When installed, SymbolicLinker adds a “Make Symbolic Link” item to the Services context menu in Finder. Download SymbolicLinker here and move the SymbolicLinker.service file to /Library/Services (that’s /Library at the root, not in your User folder, although it should work fine there too if you don’t have multiple users on the Mac). If you do not have a Services folder in Library, just create one and put the file there. Logout and back in or reboot to activate the service. Now you’re ready to do this…
1. Shut down PDFpen is you have it open.
2. Move your ~/Library/Application Support/PDFpen folder into your Dropbox.
3. Right-click over the folder that you just moved and select Make Symbolic Link from the Services context menu. You will now have a file called “PDFpen symlink” right next to the PDFpen folder in your Dropbox.
4. Move the newly created symlink back to ~/Library/Application Support (where you just moved the original folder from) and rename it to delete the symlink portion of the file name so it is just plain “PDFpen”.
“That’s it. This also moves scripts and anything else that may be stored in that same location. (PDFpenPro scripts are in ~/Library/Application Support/PDFpenPro, so if you want those synced, you’ll need to do another symlink, but now you see how easy that is.
“Symbolic links are great combined with Dropbox when an app does not let you select where to store data. I also use them for Delicious Library and GarageSale, both of which have monster amounts of data associated with them compared to the PDFpen Library.”
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Our thanks to Steven for the great tip! Feel free to send yours to jean@smilesoftware.com.
Apparently, people like the idea of a short work week, the shorter, the better. That helped Tim Ferriss’s first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, become a huge best-seller. An authority on working smarter, not harder, Tim is always looking for a better way to do things.
For the promotion of his new book, The 4-Hour Body, Tim contacted Smile with a question:
Can you make images clickable in a PDF with PDFpen?
Answer: Yes! That’s a standard PDFpen feature. Just use the URL tool to draw a rectangle of the element you want to make clickable. PDFpen will prompt you for a link and you’re done.
We followed up with Tim to learn more about how he uses PDFpen, and found out about his clever use of mini-books for promotional purposes, attractively designed with images linked to Amazon.
* * * * *
Smile: How did you find out about PDFpen?
Tim: My assistant, Charlie Hoehn, who scours the web for the best of the best.
Smile: Were you using another tool that didn’t work for you? Why?
Tim: To create excerpt “mini-books” that can be promoted by bloggers via blogs and Facebook as free downloads. It was important that we made them attractive, and that we include clickable links to Amazon, etc.
There are many more used also in e-mail campaigns.
Smile: Do you have any PDFpen tips or tricks to share?
Tim: Haha… not really. The reason I love PDFpen is that I don’t need any tips and tricks to make it work. It’s a five-minute learning curve. I just want to get #$%& done
Tim: Would you recommend PDFpen to other Mac users?
Absolutely. It saved the day.
Smile: What are you working on now?
Tim: The new book, The 4-Hour Body, is looking to be bigger than the first book, and it took three years to write. Here’s the description — lots of blood, sweat, and tears (all literal)!
The 4-Hour Body is the result of an obsessive quest, spanning more than a decade, to hack the human body. It contains the collective wisdom of hundreds of elite athletes, dozens of MDs, and thousands of hours of jaw-dropping personal experimentation. From Olympic training centers to black-market laboratories, from Silicon Valley to South Africa, Tim Ferriss, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, fixated on one life-changing question:
For all things physical, what are the tiniest changes that produce the biggest results?
Thousands of tests later, this book contains the answers for both men and women.
From the gym to the bedroom, it’s all here, and it all works.
There are more than 50 topics covered, all with real-world experiments, many including more than 200 test subjects. You don’t need better genetics or more discipline. You need immediate results that compel you to continue.
That’s exactly what The 4-Hour Body delivers.
Here’s the YouTube trailer (1 min.):
We wish Tim all the best for success with his new book.
We are often asked if PDFpen supports the popular Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners. Support is not built into OS X for these scanners, so PDFpen cannot detect them when connected using its “Import from Scanner” command. With a little configuration, however, the software that comes with the ScanSnap, ScanSnap Manager, makes it easy to scan direct to PDFpen. Here’s how:
To configure, launch ScanSnap Manager, or bring it to the front via command-tab.
1) Choose Settings from the ScanSnap Manager menu.
2) In the resulting window uncheck “Use Quick Menu”.
3) Click “Detail” to show all the settings tabs.
4) Under the “Application” tab select PDFpen as the application. You’ll likely need to use “Add or Remove” to add PDFpen to the list of choices first.
5) Under “File Option” select PDF as the file format. Uncheck “Convert to searchable PDF”.
6) Go back to “Application”. Click the “Hide” button, and close the settings window.
Now when you press the scan button on the scanner it will scan and then automatically open the result in PDFpen.
One of my favorite new features of PDFpenPro 5 is the ability to create a PDF from HTML files or a web site.
Customers often ask for a printable copy of the help with our products. The help is initially created in HTML that can be indexed and viewed through Apple’s Help Viewer, and also viewed in a web browser. To print it, however, would mean going to every web page in the help and manually printing each one.
Creating the PDF was very easy in PDFpenPro. Here’s how.. in PDFpenPro select File->New->From HTML…, then enter the URL for the index page, and how many levels deep to go. One level is the page itself. Two levels does the page and the links from that page. Two is just right for the help. Click Create and a PDF will be created from the given URL and its immediate links.
The links within the resulting PDF all operate, and even a table of contents is generated!
To finish the job I chose “Number Pages” from PDFpenPro’s Script menu, and then inserted a blank page at the start of the document and used it to place a title.
The new help PDF file can now be saved and printed with ease.
David A. has a simple but time-saving method for filling out non-interactive forms in PDFpen. These are forms that don’t actually have built-in form fields to fill in. You have to use the Text tool to overlay text to fill out the form.
If you double-click the Text tool, it stays selected so that you can insert multiple text boxes, one after the other. But that strategy has its drawbacks:
My problem with double-clicking the Text tool is that I usually need the Select tool to fine-tune alignment after I enter text. So what I do is create one text box, fill it with some sample text, get the font settings I want and then copy that text box to the clipboard. Then I just stick with the Select tool, pointing and pasting wherever I want text and then editing and adjusting.
If you find yourself needing to switch between the Text tool and the Select tool often while filling out a form, this could save you time and mousing!
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.
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!
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.
Smile: How did you find out about PDFpen?
Gordon Meyer, author of Smart Home Hacks, wrote an article entitled “My Paperless Office” which appeared on 
We got this email from BJ Strass, the publisher of Scooter Rider: