Product Reviews

We all collect PDF documents, even without meaning to. Product manuals, font catalogues, company reports and even business letters are routinely sent in this format. At last, there's an elegant and comprehensive way to manage, search and view these documents. Yep describes itself as 'iPhoto for PDFs', and it's not difficult to see why: it uses a similar interface, with scalable thumbnails, and has the same intuitive approach that makes iPhoto so easy to use. Unlike iPhoto, though, Yep doesn't require you to do all the hard work of keywording, as it will automatically extract keywords from text documents. Adding your own is also a snap: if it's one you've used before, it will appear predictively as you begin to type it.

All the keywords you've used appear in an alphabetical list down the side of the window, shown in a font size relative to the number of times that keyword appears in your collection. Moving

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the cursor down the list causes them to zoom, dock-like, beneath the cursor; documents using the keyword you roll over show that word popping up on top of them. Rolling the cursor over a PDF thumbnail, however, pops up an enlarged view of the front page of the document, showing included keywords hovering above it.

Double-clicking the icon of a PDF in Yep will open it within the main window, from where you can print or email it, or choose to open it in an external application such as Preview or Adobe Reader. Information about the current file is clearly displayed in a side panel.

PDF files can be added to Yep without physically moving them from their original location: either individual files or whole folders can be dragged in or chosen in a dialog. Yep also supports scanning directly into the application, using Twain or your scanner's proprietary software.

PDFs can be filed in collections, if you wish, to make locating them easier, although search facilities are available. In addition, a Smart Collection system operates on similar principles to Mail's Smart Folders, enabling collections to contain only those documents that meet your criteria.

As yet, you can't drag thumbnails to change their viewing order, and there's no facing-page support for document viewing. However, Yep is a well thought-out, clean and useful product that does a great job of managing difficult files. It's also free, although there are plans to implement a shareware charge for future releases.