PDF Buddy
Trim, number, stamp, and collate your PDFs — on your own Mac, iPhone or iPad, all in one pass. Nothing is uploaded anywhere, and the file you started with is left exactly as it was.
PDF Buddy is included in my bundles, along with over twenty other apps.
One pass, not six uploads
Drop four files in and they are one document. Tick what you want done — trim, compress, number, watermark — and save once. There is no verb to pick first, and no round trip between each one.
Compression that keeps the words
A scan of a page and a page of text are not the same problem, so PDF Buddy doesn’t treat them alike. It re-encodes the pictures and leaves text and line art untouched, so the file gets smaller and stays sharp and selectable.
Trimming that really cuts
Preview’s crop sets a box and leaves everything outside it in the file. PDF Buddy finds the ink on each page and genuinely cuts to it — the margin is gone from the export, not hidden. A scanned book fills the screen at last.
Redaction that destroys
A black rectangle drawn over a PDF hides nothing: the text sits underneath, selectable. PDF Buddy finds emails, card numbers, social security numbers and faces — on your own device, never in a cloud — and burns the page so the words are gone from the file.
Stamps that know their job
Page numbers, Bates numbers that keep counting across every file you split out, six-slot headers and footers with date and filename tokens, and text or image watermarks. Set the corner on a grid rather than guessing at coordinates.
See it before you save
The Result tab renders a page through the very pipeline that writes the file, so what you are looking at is what you will get — redactions included. Worth checking before a document goes to someone else.
Screenshots
On iPhone and iPad
The same one pass, wherever the PDF lands.
PDF Buddy is a native iPhone and iPad app too, with the same tasks behind the same switches — trim, compress, redact, number, stamp, watermark, interleave, n‑up — and the same Result preview drawn by the pipeline that writes the file. Open a PDF from Files, Mail or the share sheet and send the finished copy back out the same way. On iPad it’s the Mac’s layout: pages in the middle, tasks down the right.
Get PDF Buddy
On the App Store for Mac, iPhone and iPad — one purchase covers all three, on macOS 13 or iOS 17 and later. Or free to try as a direct download for the Mac — with nothing held back: no watermark on your exports, no truncated files, no disabled tasks. A license for the direct build removes the occasional reminder and supports the work; it requires macOS 13 or later. Buying more than one app? PDF Buddy is included in my bundles.
Support
Questions or bug reports? Email ben.dansby@gmail.com and you’ll get a reply, usually within a day or two.
For how-to documentation, see the PDF Buddy documentation.
For privacy questions, see the privacy policy.