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Discover PDFClerk Pro

To gain a basic understanding of PDFClerk we recommend you ready these paragraphs and at least the Understanding Pages, Sheets and Layout section to which you will find a link immediately below these introductory texts.

PDFClerk Pro is a PDF creation tool that allows a large number of manipulations to existing PDF documents, as well as allowing the creation of PDF documents from non PDF material (such as graphics and text), or a mix of the two. It offers sensible default behaviour so that you can quickly create new PDF documents with both basic and more advanced layouts, or easily print booklets for on the road or distribution to your clients, staff or students, etc. At the same time it provides flexible and advanced control over the layout of the final document so that you can create layouts that will fit your professional needs, whether for personal use, in-house printing, publication, distribution, etc.

PDF documents vs PDFClerk documents

It is important to understand that a PDFClerk document, the file format natively saved by PDFClerk is not equivalent to a PDF document. PDFClerk documents do not even need to have any original PDF content as their source and can be created completely from scratch from within PDFClerk. A PDF document is exported from a PDFClerk document when the latter has been edited as needed and is ready for production. A PDF document produced from PDFClerk will not be as editable as the PDFClerk document from which it was produced. Anything edited in a PDFClerk document, conversely, remains editable in later sessions with that document.

Often PDFClerk is used to quickly impose an original PDF for printing a document as a booklet, and neither PDF document nor PDFClerk document are saved to disk.

PDFClerk Pro Generic Document Icon

PDFClerk documents save with a modified preview of their first page as their icon. The icon will always sport a small folded edge at the top right, a yellow and black ribbon at the bottom and a plastic binding comb at the left, so that it remains easily distinguishable from Mac OS X’s PDF preview (which uses a different looking (thinner) comb and no ribbon at the bottom).


File Formats Recognized by PDFClerk

PDFClerk Pro recognizes the following file formats:

The graphics and text document formats are supported thorugh operating system provided importers and may vary in availability and quality as you update your system. (Usually it gets better, or at least stays the same as you upgrade to newer versions of the OS.)


Understanding Pages, Sheets and Layout.

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PDFClerk Pro can work on a document's original pages and can lay them out (impose them) onto sheets, or resize and scale them with great flexibility.

bullet Understanding Pages, Sheets and Layout


Viewing Documents.

Show Crop Box Bounds While Viewing Document By Media Box

A range of options is available as to how the contents of a document are displayed. Choose the most appropriate one for the task at hand.

bullet Viewing Documents


Impositions and Templates.

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Imposition is a term used in the printing industry. It is the arranging of how pages are imaged onto sheets of paper so that they fold into the correct order and orientation after printing.

bullet Impositions and Templates


The Inspector Panel.

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The Inspector Panel provides a convenient and efficient way to examine and edit pages and their objects.

bullet Inspector Panel


The Page List.

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The Page List lists all the pages in the document and allows selecting, adding, deleting, sorting and rearranging, renaming and relabeling pages.

bullet Page List


The Sheet List.

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The Sheet List lists all the sheets in an imposed document and allows selecting, renaming and relabeling sheets.

bullet Sheet List


The Thumbnail View.

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The Thumbnail View shows an overview of thumbnails of each page in the document (or sheet in an imposed document).

bullet Thumbnail View (Light Table)


The Search Results List.

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The Search Results List shows a list of hits for the current search terms.

bullet Search Results List


The Outline List.

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The Outline List lists all outline items (bookmarks) defined for the document.

bullet Outline List


Application Preferences.

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The Application Preferences Dialog allows adjustment of application wide preferences.

bullet Application Preferences Dialog


Document Settings.

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The Document Settings Dialog allows adjustment of document wide settings.

bullet Document Settings Dialog


The Media Browser.

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The Media Browser allows easy access to both PDFClerk specific and system wide media.

bullet Media Browser