Pixelmator Pro 3.4 brings advanced support for PDF files

[Aurelija]

Pixelmator Pro 3.4 Camelot is here! It introduces a completely revamped PDF engine that now lets you select and open individual pages from multi-page PDF documents, work with vector PDFs, edit PDFs created using Safari, Keynote, and other iWork apps, and a whole lot more.

Learn more about the update on our blog.

[Harris]

Thank you for this AWESOME PDF update! Very helpful.

Would love to be able to:
1. Easily export edited pages of a PDF back into the right place in the full PDF document they came from without opening another app.
2. Import all pages of a PDF into Pixelmator Pro at once for editing
3. Use super-resolution just on selected elements within a document, not the whole document

Thanks again for making Pixelmator Pro even better!

[newbie user guy]

those are excellent wants

[James Zhan]

Um, this is so amazing???

Hate working with Adobe Acrobat; it's so slow and buggy. Excited to just rely on Pixelmator Pro for PDF tasks from now on! Thanks for this!!

[Aurelija]

Thanks for the love on the update, everyone! We hope it makes your editing workflows easier. To answer Harris's feedback:

1. We totally get where you're coming from. Right now, Pixelmator Pro doesn't have that built-in, but if you use the Preview app on your Mac, it's pretty easy to shuffle pages around or drop an edited page back to an existing document.

2. Custom multi-page support is something we've left for later updates. For now, you can use the "Convert PDF Pages to PXD" shortcut from our blog to get the job done. It will split any PDF into separate pages and convert then to PXD documents ready for editing. Once you've edited those pages, the "Create a Multi-Page PDF" shortcut will help you gather them back into one neat PDF.

3. I'm curious, how you'd use the selective Super Resolution? You could use the Super Resolution algorithm in the Free Transform tool to only upscale the selected layers. But normally, you should be fine using Super Resolution on the entire document as vector layers will scale the same, no matter the algorithm, so Super Resolution would only affect how non-vector elements look like in the scaled up document.

[Tony T]

Excellent! Great update.
Thanks!!

[Tony T]

Thanks for the love on the update, everyone! We hope it makes your editing workflows easier. To answer Harris's feedback:

2. Custom multi-page support is something we've left for later updates. For now, you can use the "Convert PDF Pages to PXD" Shortcut from our blog to get the job done. It will split any PDF into separate pages and convert then to PXD documents ready for editing. Once you've edited those pages, the "Create a Multi-Page PDF" shortcut will help you gather them back into one neat PDF.

I haven't had a chance to test, but in macOS that you can use a shortcut to split a pdf into separate pages (Split PDF into Pages)

[Aurelija]

I haven't had a chance to test, but in macOS that you can use a shortcut to split a pdf into separate pages (Split PDF into Pages)

That’s right! We used this exact action in the “Convert PDF Pages to PXD” shortcut.

[Republiken]

Um, this is so amazing???

Hate working with Adobe Acrobat; it's so slow and buggy. Excited to just rely on Pixelmator Pro for PDF tasks from now on! Thanks for this!!

Adobe Acrobat buggy and slow? I use it every day and it works fine.

Anyway, I like what Pixelmator is capable of.

I have been playing around with a few PDFs now and I ask myself if I am making some fatal mistakes ... OK, I see what I see, everything looks like the original PDF, photo and text. But here is the problem and I ask myself why this hype?? I can select the photo and change it. But the text. The text is NOT text, the characters are vectors, resting on individual layers! Enormous amounts! Holy Christ!

When I open the exact same PDF in Adobe Acrobat or PDF Expert, I can do the same with the photo. BUT, God Save The King, I can edit the text because the text is TEXT!

So, Pixelmator Pro is wonderful in many ways, the collaboration with Apple Motion is one of my favourites (working with movies is NOT).

I hope that I have made that fatal mistake regarding PDFs and I will change my mind. But as for now: Adobe is KING. Pixelmator Pro is, well OK then, the Prince, not the KING! And Pixelmator (not PRO) is much more fun to deal with. Sad that Pixelmator Pro left that technique!

I have now continued my research and opened a PDF in Affinity Photo, the equivalent of Pixelmator Pro. It elegantly opened my PDF and the text was completely editable as the text was TEXT and not vectors. Affinity Designer could do the same. And Affinity Publisher, of course! Adobe Illustrator could very helplessly edit text, but the text was TEXT!

So, working with PDFs, I would avoid Pixelmator Pro, Illustrator, Photoshop (which turned out to be as bad as Pixelmator Pro) at any cost. First of all, I would choose Adobe Acrobat (superb), followed by PDF Expert ( very good and so charming). If I, for some reason, would have to get a PDF into some other software, the three Affinity pieces are superb! Very nice.

To finish this, I must say that Pixelmator is a lovely piece of software. I work professionally with the whole Adobe Creative Apps and that is outstanding. Also I use the Affinity trio and Apple, of course. And, Pixelmator for making stuff to be used in Apple Motion!

[adamjd]

HUH?! The FIRST thing I went to do when I saw this big update...is simply add a HYPERLINKED TEXT. There have been requests on this going back for years. Pages can do it. Figma can do it. (Of course, Acrobat can do it.) The major PDF update to Pixelmator...cannot?

From the blog post: ". . . we also wanted to extend the existing PDF support on macOS and make it easy for users to edit the PDF documents they create using everyday Mac apps." Well, I have a simple image with hyperlinked text I had added in Pages.I opened it in Pixelmator...link is GONE. It's not editable...AND the text is converted into paths. So, beyond not being able to ADD links, is Pixelmator destroying the links in PDFs so that I can't use Pixelmator to edit a page that has links?

No doubt that a good amount of work went in here, but I still need to take extra time to go into Pages or even Figma after Pixelmator Pro because the "advanced pdf support" doesn't have this basic feature.

@Andrius You've mentioned this in a couple of threads. https://www.pixelmator.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=18357, you wrote

...adding support for things like hyperlinks and text is a rather significant feature and we're currently focusing more on the image editing side of things, rather than something like this, which would be more for document creation and publishing.

After reading the update post talking about the integration, IMHO, this would have been the time.

[Stev Nicholas]

it would be great to see videos showcasing the features. it's difficult for a pdf user to fully understand the new features by reading it. maybe it's just me

[Vincent413]

finally, vector pdf!!!

[Juhani]

Thanks, great stuff! Next up Content Aware Fill and Auto-Align/Auto-Blend Layers, please

[Reza]

You guys are amazing. This app is soooooo good. Can't wait for generative fill.

[Republiken]

Pixelmator Pro 3.4 Camelot is here! It introduces a completely revamped PDF engine that now lets you select and open individual pages from multi-page PDF documents, work with vector PDFs, edit PDFs created using Safari, Keynote, and other iWork apps, and a whole lot more.

Learn more about the update on our blog.

<p><img src="//support-cdn.pixelmator.com/uploads-new/cuf_1694437279_Lead_2.png" class="postimage is-shown is-visible" alt="Image" width="1603.5" height="971"></p>

I have been playing around with a few PDFs now and I ask myself if I am making some fatal mistakes ... OK, I see what I see, everything looks like the original PDF, photo and text. But here is the problem and I ask myself why this hype?? I can select the photo and change it. But the text. The text is NOT text, the characters are vectors, resting on individual layers! Enormous amounts! Holy Christ!

When I open the exact same PDF in Adobe Acrobat or PDF Expert, I can do the same with the photo. BUT, God Save The King, I can edit the text because the text is TEXT!

So, Pixelmator Pro is wonderful in many ways, the collaboration with Apple Motion is one of my favourites (working with movies is NOT).

I hope that I have made that fatal mistake regarding PDFs and I will change my mind. But as for now: Adobe is KING. Pixelmator Pro is, well OK then, the Prince, not the KING! And Pixelmator (not PRO) is much more fun to deal with. Sad that Pixelmator Pro left that technique!

I have now continued my research and opened a PDF in Affinity Photo, the equivalent of Pixelmator Pro. It elegantly opened my PDF and the text was completely editable as the text was TEXT and not vectors. Affinity Designer could do the same. And Affinity Publisher, of course! Adobe Illustrator could very helplessly edit text, but the text was TEXT!

So, working with PDFs, I would avoid Pixelmator Pro, Illustrator, Photoshop (which turned out to be as bad as Pixelmator Pro) at any cost. First of all, I would choose Adobe Acrobat (superb), followed by PDF Expert ( very good and so charming). If I, for some reason, would have to get a PDF into some other software, the three Affinity pieces are superb! Very nice.

To finish this, I must say that Pixelmator is a lovely piece of software. I work professionally with the whole Adobe Creative Apps and that is outstanding. Also I use the Affinity trio and Apple, of course. And, Pixelmator for making stuff to be used in Apple Motion!

[adamjd]

have been playing around with a few PDFs now and I ask myself if I am making some fatal mistakes ... OK, I see what I see, everything looks like the original PDF, photo and text. But here is the problem and I ask myself why this hype?? I can select the photo and change it. But the text. The text is NOT text, the characters are vectors, resting on individual layers! Enormous amounts
. . .
I have now continued my research and opened a PDF in Affinity Photo, the equivalent of Pixelmator Pro. It elegantly opened my PDF and the text was completely editable as the text was TEXT and not vectors. Affinity Designer could do the same. And Affinity Publisher, of course! Adobe Illustrator could very helplessly edit text, but the text was TEXT!

YES...this is what I've detailed above. I was excited when I saw the email come in. The implementation here is certainly not something to brag about. It's half-baked.

[Ricky Dominguez]

Love the update, but I have a problem with colors when I import PDF with layers, I have no color problem when import PDF with layers is uncheck.

[aga123]

Hello, one of the problems I encountered today was not being able to export PDF with Selectable Text

As discussed here: viewtopic.php?t=18092

Was this capability implemented in this update?

I'm relatively new to this -> I think it is working, my question is, now that I have a selectable PDF, how might I change such text (outside of the App)?

[ddas]

This is amazing. Any chance of a comprehensive YouTube tutorial on all this, showing it in action?

[Matrix Web Studio]

Thank you for the PDF update

[Chanco]

Thanks, guys !

[Martin Chalifoux]

Thanks, great stuff! Next up Content Aware Fill and Auto-Align/Auto-Blend Layers, please

+1

[Republiken]

You guys are amazing. This app is soooooo good. Can't wait for generative fill.

Fix the PDF scandal first!

[Republiken]

You guys are amazing. This app is soooooo good. Can't wait for generative fill.

Well, we are talking about problems with PDF files here and that is something Pixelmator Pro have not solved. Not in the least.

[adamjd]

It feels like the developers switched to HDR and left us hanging on 3.4. Any updates on the BASIC part support for PDFs in Pixemator Pro...as in editing text?