Today we’re looking at PDNob, a PDF editor from Tenorshare. If you only highlight a few lines and send the file back, you can survive with a basic reader. But if you annotate properly, edit original PDF content, manage pages, run OCR on scans, handle forms, and protect documents, you need a full editor that doesn’t cost a fortune. PDNob aims for exactly that: a budget-friendly PDF editor with a surprisingly full toolset.
Supported platforms and pricing
The app runs on macOS and Windows, and Tenorshare lists iOS support. You don’t get an iPad or Android app, though. The developers say it’s in the pipeline, but no clear dates yet. Now let’s get into the good stuff.
PDF annotation
Annotation matters because it’s the most common PDF workflow. PDNob gets the basics right and keeps the experience clean. You get all the tools you’d expect: highlighter, underline, and strikeout. I love the default colours they chose for these tools. I didn’t have to change them, which I usually do. That makes the app feel ready the moment you start using it. A small but refreshing detail.
Editing annotations also feels straightforward. You can adjust colour, opacity, and thickness. You can also comment on your annotations, to give them more meaning and depth. For those occasions when you want to remember why you highlighted something. But they can also be independent, standing alone, without tying them to any annotation. I love that the app has both!
Beyond that, you also get: shapes, stickers, signatures, and stamps. The shapes feel solid and complete for PDF annotation. Nothing is missing. The stickers look cute if you like a visual style when reviewing. Stamps come with a limitation: PDNob doesn’t support custom ones. So, you’re stuck with the built-in ones. If you rely on custom approval stamps for work, you’ll notice that gap… I also love how readily available the comments are when you need to read them.
PDF editing: text and images
PDNob goes beyond annotation and lets you edit the PDF’s original content. You can remove or add text, and even adjust: font size, colour, and formatting (bold, italic, underlined, and struck out). It also supports alignment, superscript, and subscript. It covers the common “fix this PDF quickly” use cases.
PDNob also gives you proper image editing inside PDFs. You can crop, resize, rotate, replace, or move images in front or to the back of other items on the page. That layering control matters when you place logos, stamps, or signatures and you want them to sit correctly without ruining readability. You can also extract images to save them to your computer as png or jpg.
Links
Links turn PDFs into proper reference systems. PDNob supports both visible and invisible hyperlinks that not only link to other pages in the document and websites, but links to documents on your Mac as well. How cool is that? It’s definitely my favourite feature in the app.
Cropping
You can also crop pages to remove parts you don’t want, and you can apply that crop to all your pages; odd, even, or specific ones. The workflow is easy and intuitive. I wish I could extend the pages as well, but cropping means removing content, not expanding, so I understand why the app doesn’t do that.
Document protection
PDNob gives you many document protection tools. Watermarks, from either text or images, give you a lot of control over branding and help you avoid misuse (if you care about that). Text watermarks have font, colour, opacity, rotation, size, and position options that you can play around with for the look you’re going for.
PDNob includes security tools for encryption, redaction, and signatures. You can encrypt documents and redact content to hide private details before sharing.
Signing also goes beyond the basics. PDNob gives you two signature styles: a simple one, which you’ll recognise from other PDF apps. That you can simply add to a document. And a more advanced signature option that gives you more fields to protect your work. So, you can sign fast when you need speed, or properly when you need formality.
Page management
For page management, PDNob gives you headers and footers, bates numbering, merging, and compression. Page management decides whether a PDF editor feels serious or basic. PDNob covers the essentials. Bates numbers are brilliant for admin documents. You can extract pages, and delete them if you don’t want multiple copies of the page you just extracted. You can split your PDF into several files, replace pages, or rotate pages. PDNob also includes merging and compression, so you can combine documents and reduce file size for sharing.
Batch processing and conversion
Batch processing matters if you handle lots of documents. It saves you time. Instead of working on PDFs one by one, you can process sets of documents in one go. Conversion always depends on the file. Some documents convert cleanly, others don’t. I still want conversion inside a PDF editor, and PDNob includes it.
OCR and AI
OCR on scanned documents allows you to search its text or edit it, turning a “flat” scan into something you can actually work with.
Now the AI. PDNob lets you run AI on the whole document, but it also lets you select text and run AI on that specific selection. I prefer the selection approach because it feels more specific. You might want an explanation, summary, or paraphrase one paragraph, not the whole document. It also makes more sense for privacy when you keep the scope smaller.
Forms
PDNob includes form tools, something I don’t see everywhere: extracting data from forms. That feature helps a lot when you need to process forms, review submissions, or pull information out without manually copying everything. It also lets you create forms, using text fields, checkboxes, and dropdown menus.
What I don’t like
Now for the weak points, because you will notice them.
First: scrolling. It doesn’t feel smooth, or as responsive as it should. I had to put more effort than usual to get the pages moving. Even then, getting to the exact spot you want is still difficult. The PDF also tends to move around horizontally, which can be distracting.
Second: zoom. PDNob doesn’t give you a zoom preset to fit the width of your screen. Most PDF apps include that, and it makes reading and reviewing easier. PDNob also makes zooming feel less natural. You rely on the drop-down menu instead of using a direct zoom interaction; the pinch-to-zoom gesture.
Third: linking needs a better workflow. PDNob supports links to other pages, web pages, and files, and I love that. But you need to know the exact page number you want to link to. An impossible expectation. That creates friction in long documents because you can’t easily browse pages while creating links. I need a page overview or a navigation view inside the linking tool, so that I can link accurately without relying on memory.
