My main purposes of using PDFClerk are:
- combining and extracting pages from PDF-files
- adding TOC and Hyperlinks to PDF documents
- add my signature to a file (not often)
- adding notes and comments to a PDF document (very seldom)

Beside the basic feature (extracting and combining) a very important taks is to add a TOC sometimes to an already existing PDF file. Since providing manuals and instructions in PDF format is common every vendor does this but in a more or less good way. Understandig the users need and how he might use such a document to have links within the document is essential. But some manufacturers do not provide that functionality. Depending on how important a user manual is I am doing a TOC on my own. It takes some time but afterwards I get a useful and easy to navigate manual.

Wishlist:
having some OCR functioality built into PDFClerk might be interesting and also to have compression features when doing a “Save as..”

The program is powerful, and with power came complexity. I’ll have to admit that it took me a while to create the settings I needed (1-signature, 4-up pages for perfect-binding meant re-numbering the pages—4, 1, 2, 3 on top, 8, 5, 6, 7 on bottom—and removing the default page margins), but now that I’ve done the initial work, I’m back in print. Yay!

I’ve got a book fair next month and was afraid I might be completely stuck—unable to make any books. But PDF Clerk came through for me. I paid for it gladly, and give you my thanks.

Now, how would I number the pages for a tiny perfect-bound book laid out 16-up? The math of that threatens to make my head explode.

I need the same level of detail on “create and edit interactive PDF forms”, the product description’s line item (plus the rave reviews of the product and the support) which sold me on buying 2 licenses for PDFClerk Pro yesterday. I unfortunately only got two choices this life, and I chose Live well, and Live happy…I had to leave behind, “Able to glean wisdom from manuals that don’t spell it out for me.” I can’t figure out the “form creation” and “widget creation” actions.

I want to create forms. I have wanted to create forms for a long time. Of course, I want the computer to do all the work.

I want to layout a form in Word or Pages, import the form in those formats or as a pdf into PDFClerk Pro. (I did get that far. My .pdf import nicely.)

PDFClerk Pro should then look at all the possible check boxes and blank lines and 1) convert the checkbox or radio button or blank line to the proper PDFClerk widget or form box on the screen for modifying input there, eliminating wrong guesses and adding new check widgets or blanks to fill in, and simultaneously, 2) create a Form Inspection List of potential form items and their suggested titles.

The Form Inspector List would be easy to modify and of course add lines or subtract lines and change the tab order.

When the Form Inspector List is finished, it is in the format that can be imported to create the data points of a MySQL file that the form relates to. Eventually a widget could be designed to properly create or modify such a form in the manner that a web design tool uploads their output to a host provider.

Perhaps this is already done, and I just can’t glean how to do it from the manual. I can get the pdf of my form into PDFClerk Pro, but am stuck on the next steps. I don’t see the Form Inspector List under the Editors and Inspectors at all. I don see

As long as I am dreaming up the wish list for what I think of as a Form Creation feature, I would like to have;

An output mode that optimizes for different screen sizes. Thus, one version of the form will be appropriate for an iPhone screen, and another for the typical portable computer screen. This way, someone walking around doing an inspection using the form will have the appropriate requests in front of them.

Some items on the form should auto fill with the likely or most recent data.
Pull down menus of available choices (one as the standard) as well as ‘Other’ which brings up a blank to be filled in.

Auto Dates and time fields…the logical choices.               
Self numbering pages.
Pop up boxes that explain a choice, or refers someone to a manual page. Or if the have the manual in the device, it will bring up a lot more data. Or if the device is attached to the web, it will bring up a lot more data.
Boxes which auto-tab to the next box when x number of numbers or letters are put in.
Flashing red lines of error data that come back to the person who doesn’t fill in a piece of data, or fills in the data in the wrong format (e.g., using numbers where letters only are allowed, not putting in Y amount of letters and/or numbers when Y amount is demanded. (These type of things would follow MySQL standards).

I believe I saw some of these things when I looked over the shoulder of someone who dropped my file onto Acrobat 8. We had less than a minute to poke around during that try, so I don’t know what the potential and limits of that tool are.

Obviously, you can see where I am heading…the ridiculous request that the data put into these forms generated by PDFClerk Pro will be able to auto-form into a pdf file in a reverse manner. But that’s another matter for another post.

I’m a regular business guy (but formerly a publishing and print expert—no more imposing for me!)
I’ll be using PDFClerk for assembling/reassembling and annotating PDFs.

Thanks for creating such a simple app for this purpose.

I find sending documents via PDF in email much easier than using a fax theses days. I prefer people to send me documents in email than get them in a big pile from the fax machine. One advantage when you get them in email is you can choose whether to print out or not. Another is they are automatically archived for you—unlike a printed fax sheet which if mislaid, not received or damaged you need it (on the other side) found and re-sent to you, then you go thru the whole process again.

There are several programs I have which I have used in the past. I never even thought to look until I needed to deal with a 60some page document and I tried to take some pages out and re-order some and although the program is well known and worked well for small 5-6 page sets, it choked and crawled with this big a set. That is how I was motivated to look for another solution and was happy to find this program. It re-drew the screens and moving a page from the bottom of the stack to the top was “easy” in comparison to the other two programs I had tried to do the job with before.

We have a house that we run vacation rentals from and our clients appreciate it when we can send them their quote with most of the policies and information they might need at the very first response we have. Unfortunately the vacation rental software drops the ball when printing and shoots out individual pages. So I needed something to combine the pages and then convert to a single document. PDFClerk does this with its eyes closed.

So far I have used it dozens of times in this sending out quotes and statements and receipts and it has worked as well as other programs I have encountered.

What sets it apart tho is when you need to handle the big jobs. The 60 some page document was when I used a document scanner to take two separate paper appraisals and convert to digital PDF files. The scanner does a good job, but we live in an area up near the rainforest and our paper tends to “stick” so I had to do a lot of scans instead of one continuous scan in one set. Had it not been for PDFClerk it would have been an extremely frustrating and time consuming experience. And I had two of these appraisals to do, so I was very glad that this software was available to test and within 15 minutes I knew it could do the job and I was a happy purchaser.

One thing I think is very neat is the relabel command under the tool bar—instead of tediously having to go from page to page you can have the program do it in one fast swoop.

I have not had the time yet to use other features, but if I do I will come back and give a comment. It has many features I have not tapped into which look like they would be very useful. It appears it should be a one-stop PDF utility.

I like the fact that I don’t need to have one PDF application or utility for one process and another PDF application or utility for another process. Considering what some developers charge this investment should not only save the nuisance of going from one application to another (and also the time in doing that and the time in learning multiple programs) it should also save some money not needing to buy several programs to do the same thing.

Conclusion to date: I use it for taking pages out, re-ordering pages, re-labeling the pages and then combining the edited pages to a single file. And the documents I have worked with have in some cases exceeded 60 pages and the program handled that workload fluidly.

As a PDFClerk user the most important features for me are joining several PDF files together (often printed directly to PDFClerk through the print services menu, from either a browser or a source code editor) and the standard 2 page imposition to create booklets. I either fold them, or may take them to a print shop and have them cut and bound. For creating the booklets I often find myself quickly adjusting the margins in the Document Settings panel, as well as sometimes numbering or re-numbering the pages with the “Relabel Selected Pages” feature in combination with the “Page Labels” settings in the Document Settings panel. When printing from a browser I often find I want to delete the last page, so that is another PDFClerk muscle that is regularly exercised.