Basics

  • Since PDF Nomad cannot alter contents that are already part of the page streams, it cannot remove existing text from the actual PDF document structure. It can however remove text visually from pages by masking it out, and optionally overwriting it with a text with new text. PDF Nomad is even designed to make small corrections to text easy and efficient. See the section on text editing for details.

    Due to the nature in which textual information can be stored in PDF documents, it may not always be possible for editors reading those files to extract textual information from the underlying page streams, even though the pages obviously contain text. When this is the case, and you try to extract text by selecting and copying it, then when you paste the text into, say, a word processor, what you end up with is likely to look like garbage. This is almost never due to an error of the editor (like PDF Nomad) reading the PDF data, but the consequence of the way the PDF was encoded. In these cases you may be able to restore the text by performing OCR on the document. Starting with version 2.0 PDF Nomad can OCR any PDF document. See the chapter on OCR for more information.

  • PDF Nomad can read the page labels of a PDF document, and it can edit the labels and use them to stamp the labels onto the pages on the document. This is very useful if you want to add page numbers to a document that doesn't have them.

    Due to a limitation in the Mac OS X system frameworks used by PDF Nomad to save the modified documents, any custom page labels are lost when the document is saved back out to storage. The stamps on the pages are not lost, but if you re-open the file in a PDF reader/editor you will see that the pages are numbered sequentially from 1 up, regardless of the labeling scheme in the document at the moment it was saved.

    The majority of PDF documents don't specify page labels or specify regular sequentially numbered page labels. For those documents the behavior described above is not an issue since no information is lost. For documents that use different styles of labels, or otherwise non-regular page labels the behavior only becomes an issue if the modified document is to be used digitally (PDF readers) and the labels important. For documents destined for printing, the behavior should never be an issue.

  • The document window is divided into three main areas: the Page List View, the Preview Canvas and the Outline List View. These three views make up your main working area for manipulating PDF document content.

  • Pages may be prepared either for a finished medium, such as a sheet of paper, or as part of a prepress process in which the content of pages is placed on an intermediate medium, such as film or an imposed reproduction plate. When an intermediate medium is part of the process, it becomes important to distinguish it from the finished page. Additional production-related content that falls outside the boundaries of the finished page (e.g. registration marks) may be needed on the intermediate product. To handle these requirements, a PDF page can define up to five separate boxes (boundaries) to control the various aspects of the imaging process:

    1. Media Box: Defines the bounds of the physical medium on which the page is to be printed and the location the page (the contents) on that medium. A media box’s origin (left and bottom) is usually 0, 0, but it may be offset to adjust the alignment of the contents. Negative values will move the contents to the right and up; positive values will move the contents to the left and down. When changing the size of a media box PDF Nomad can optionally scale the contents of the page to adjust to its new size, either proportionally, or independently for each axis. When scaling proportionally PDF Nomad can align the contents on the page automatically.
    2. Crop Box: Defines the region to which the contents of the page are to be clipped (cropped) when displayed or printed. Unlike the other boxes, the crop box has no defined meaning in terms intended use; it merely imposes clipping on the medium’s contents.
    3. Bleed Box: Defines the region to which the contents of the page should be clipped during the finishing process, such as extra bleed area to accommodate the physical limitations of cutting, folding, and trimming equipment. The page as printed may include finishing marks that fall outside the bleed box, and are cut off when trimmed.
    4. Trim Box: Defines the dimensions of the finished product after trimming. It may be smaller than the media box to allow for production-related content, such as trim and registration marks, color bars, etc.
    5. Art Box: Defines the extent of a page’s meaningful content (including potential white space) as intended by the page’s creator.

    Which Display Box Is Drawn?

    PDF Nomad defaults to using the crop box when rendering pages, but it can be set to use any of the other boxes for rendering. Pages is drawn according to the box selected from the Active Display Box menu under the View menu.

    On Screen Display Boxes
    The View menu offers options to show the bounds of any display box on-screen. Select the display boxes you want to see under View Overlays.

  • There are three View modes in PDF Nomad. Text mode, which is the default; Annotate mode, which is used to add and edit dynamic and static annotations, and Crop and Shift mode, which is used to alter the size of individual pages, change display box dimensions and shift the contents of the page in any direction.

  • The Page List is the principal work area: it lists the master pages in your document, either as a list of all pages, as thumbnails, or as a list of pages that contain specific text.

    The pages usually find their source in an imported PDF document, but they may be pages added by PDF Nomad as originally blank pages, or as pages with imported text or graphical content (e.g. by importing text based documents or pictures directly into PDF Nomad).

Tasks

  • This section describes how to annotate pages with objects like text boxes, highlights and underlines, lines, arrows and other shapes, form fields and links. You can also use text boxes to correct typos and make other small alterations to the text. (This is done by overlaying the text to be corrected with an opaque text box.)

    Static annotations:
    Static annotations are objects that PDF Nomad adds to the page stream when a PDF document is generated. These objects are not editable afterwards by most PDF editors, thus making them eminently suitable to permanently alter the visual contents of PDF pages (e.g. masking out text and graphics, or making minor corrections to written text, like correcting typos.)

    Static annotations can be arbitrarily rotated by holding down the command button while pointing at one of the four resize thumbs on the sides of the object and the clicking and dragging (the cursor will change to a rotate cursor when you hover over resize thumb while holding down the command key). Alternatively, if you use a trackpad, you can rotate selected annotations by hovering above a selected annotation and performing a rotate gesture with two fingers on the trackpad.

    Dynamic annotations:
    These are the standard annotations as defined by the PDF format. They remain editable by PDF editors after the PDF has been created. They are especially useful for exchanging markup and comments on shared documents.

  • From version 2.0 onwards PDF Nomad can be extensively scripted. To learn PDF Nomad's scripting vocabulary inspect its scripting dictionary through an application like Mac OS X's AppleScript Editor. Some examples of short scripts follow:

  • The bookmarks menu allows you to create and organize a personal library of PDF documents. You can create links to specific pages in any open PDF document, and later open a document directly to the specified page, by selecting the link from the menu. (These bookmarks are not to be confused with outlines, which are sometimes also called bookmarks, but which are usually used to create tables of contents for quick access when browsing a PDF document.)

  • This section describes how you can create and edit outlines.

  • Non Mac App Store version only: You can install PDF Nomad as a PDF Service so that you can print a PDF to it directly from the print dialog. This is useful, for instance, if you want to impose the created PDF into a booklet.

    To install PDF Nomad as a PDF service, open the application preferences and click the Install PDF Service button. After installation printing to PDF Nomad becomes available in the the print dialog’s PDF menu. Choosing Print PDF to PDF Nomad from the menu will then print documents straight into PDF Nomad, opening it if it is not running.

  • This lesson shows how to create books and magazines from your PDF documents. Books and magazines are created through a process called imposition, which imposes groups multiple PDF pages onto a single sheets in a new PDF document.

  • This section describes how to create forms with PDF Nomad.

    Form field annotations allow the creation of interactive PDF forms which consist of a collection of fields for gathering information interactively from the user. PDF documents may contain an arbitrary number of fields appearing on any combination of pages, all of which together make up a single interactive form spanning the entire document.

    You add form annotations by activating Annotate mode and selecting one of the options available under the Forms heading in the second popup from the annotation toolbar.

  • You can easily add document keywords but selecting one or more words and and control-clicking (or right-clicking) the page and selecting Add selection as keyword from the popup menu. The selection will be added as a single keyword to the document metadata. If the selection spans multiple lines, only the first line will be considered.

  • Although PDF Nomad cannot remove text that is already on the page (except for text annotations), it can overwrite text with using opaque text boxes, and even has a provision to aid in making small corrections easy and efficient.

  • When you save a document PDF Nomad saves a new version of the PDF file you opened, incorporating the changes you made. There are options, however, to export other variations of the document:

  • There are five ways to import content as pages into a PDF Nomad document.

    1. Insert Document
    2. Interleave PDF Documents
    3. Overlay PDF Document
    4. Import directly from scanner
    5. Drag documents from the Finder onto the page list.

    The first three options are available under the File Import menu.

  • You can have references to other pages that occur within an index table, or randomly within the text of the document, automatically linked to the page(s) they reference.

  • This lesson shows how to markup text (highlight, underline or strike-through). The video at the end of the lesson shows the process in action.

  • This section explains how to merge multiple pages into a single page; split pages vertically or horizontally, and how to tile pages into smaller sections.

  • This lesson explains how you can use Optical Character Recognition (OCR), to turn scanned (bitmapped) documents into documents whose text can be searched,selected and copied. OCR can also be used to restore text on otherwise normal (vector) PDF documents, whose textual contents, although clrearly visible on the page, have been lost or garbled. In fact, PDF Nomad will OCR any PDFdocument (for which you have printing and copying priviliges), although this feature may be of limited use in the case of normal PDF documents whose textual contents are still intact.

  • This section describes how to render and position page labels.

  • This section how to resize pages and how to shift or rotate the visible content on the page.

    There are two ways to resize pages: you can use Crop and Shift mode to resize by dragging page edges, or entering values in a popover dialog or you can use pre-canned page resizers available from the Tools → Resize Pages menu.

Appendix

  • The following table lists the meta characters that can be used in the various places in PDF Nomad that support regular expressions.