Editing pdf documents on iMac

If you mean annotate, Preview can do that as well as any other PDF application.

Preview can also highlight, rotate pages, change page order, insert or delete pages ... and you can adjust the characteristics of the annotations (color, size, etc). Among the things you cannot do in Preview - redact a document, set print or copy restrictions, rotate an arrow, merge a group of PDFs in a specified order. The only way to set a PDF password is by doing an Export. And the Quartz Filter Reduce PDF File Size function does not produce clean copy anywhere near what Acrobat can do.

"Best" is subjective. Adobe Acrobat DC has long been considered top of the line but it also has a high cost.

garyfromrio linda wrote:

Preview has the tools to edit pdf files and it is included with the OS. There are several third party pdf editors such as PDF Pen Pro or PDF Reader Pro but these will cost.

You cannot edit PDF files in Preview.

The more basic issue is that the authors of most pdfs lock the files unless they expect an edit. Even then, they sometimes forget to send an unlocked version.

Are you getting messages like "you do not have permission..." or similar alerts? If it is locked, edits are going to be nearly impossible.

Most business users edit with Adobe Acrobat: https://www.adobe.com/acrobat.html but it is still up the the author to send a editable version of the file.

Preview has the tools to edit pdf files and it is included with the OS. There are several third party pdf editors such as PDF Pen Pro or PDF Reader Pro but these will cost.

Preview can redact.

OK, then that's a new feature in Big Sur or later. It's not in the Catalina version of Preview or earlier versions of macOS . I'm still running Catalina - here are the Preview Tools:

garyfromrio linda wrote:

Preview can redact.

Correct. What it can't do is edit PDFs. Preview is a PDF reader.