I wanted to review Smile's PDFpenPro, available as a download, because I had heard a lot about what it can do. Specifically, I wanted to explore how PDFpenPro would handle converting a formatted PDF like a tax return into a fillable form. I just hate printing a form, filling it out by hand, and then either scanning it to send it via email, or sending it via US Postal mail. But I could not find this feature after my exhaustive efforts of viewing the Smile's PDFpen tutorials on their website (which are great to get you started) and searching for this feature in the program. So I sent a query to Smile's Tech Support to find out if it was capable.

Smile Support responded on 2/10/12: "PDFpenPro supports creating interactive forms, but it does not presently support automatic creation of such forms by analyzing the document. We're looking into something along that line for future development. You can add interactive elements to any PDF document using PDFpenPro. You need not start from a blank document."

Does this mean you couldn't do what you wanted? What did you then do?

Also, I'd add what some of the features of PDFpenPro. I liked what was in the Smile website.

PDFpenPro has all the features of PDFpen, but you get more features. With PDFpenPro you can edit and apply interactive form fields (text fields, radio buttons, and checkboxes, etc.) to a blank document, to a Word document, or turn a scanned document into an interactive PDF form. It is also very easy to convert a website into a multi-page PDF to collaborate with other developers. And with PDFpenPro you can make a Table of Contents for your 'Great American Novel.'

The great advantage of PDFpen ($59.95) and PDFpenPro ($99.95) is that they are easy to use and very affordable. You can download a free trial. There are free tutorials to get you started. There is a very good comparison of features table between PDFpen, PDFpenPro, Acrobat Pro 9, PDFClerk Pro 3, and Preview at tinyurl.com/4ypc5mw.

Smile also develops and supports the following products, TextExpander, TextExpander touch, PDFpen, PDFpen for iPad, and DiscLabel. PDFpen for iPad won the Best of Show 2012 from Macworld/iWorld, the Editor's Choice Award, and Beatweek Magazine.

SmileOnMyMac was formed in 2003 and the name was changed to Smile in August 2010 to reflect their expansion from the Mac to include the iPad, the iPod touch, and the iPhone.