On Message with Ben Gross

It is human nature to dislike paperwork. I recently had the displeasure of having to deal with a quantity amount of paperwork that included a mixture of PDF, Microsoft Word, and printed documents. Virtually, none of the PDF or Word files were created as fill out forms, and unfortunately most of the PDF files were scans or paper documents and thus not easily modifiable. All of this paperwork needed to be filled out, signed, and faxed back in short order. Situations such as this usually cause me to want to bang my head on my desk and wonder when I can sign up for the party where we take the very last remaining fax machine in use and reenact the scene from Office Space.

I’m often not anywhere near a fax machine, fax modem, or a scanner. In these situations, I would load up my copy Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Illustrator, overlay new text, paste in a transparent GIF of my signature, and then either print the documents and mail them or send them to an online fax service. Acrobat and Illustrator are a bit of an overkill for this particular use.

If you are working with an uncomplicated PDF that is not a scan, you can save the PDF as a Word document using Acrobat and edit the document in Microsoft Word although it may be difficult to retain the look of the original formatting.

SmileOnMyMac offers a relatively straightforward solution called PDFPen for around $50. PDFPen Pro version is about $95 and will let you create your own PDF fill out forms similar to Acrobat Pro. Both versions of PDFPen are less expensive than Acrobat Pro, and in my experience, simpler to use for this task. For example, PDFPen includes facilities to easily create a transparent GIF of your signature as well as to crop it and resize it on the fly.

With PDFPen I can now edit PDF documents, insert my signature and be done with the whole process in just a couple of minutes and that is a major improvement in my opinion.

SmileOnMyMac offers a companion product called PageSender that is about $40. It can works as a software fax machine if you have a fax modem and can handle delivering your documents via a number of commercial online fax services. Thankfully, all without a fax machine.

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