Acrobat Commenting
byI was speaking with Eric Mack and he mentioned his search for a program which kept track of what you highlighted. It didn’t dawn on me until then that Acrobat may be an answer (though not ideal).
If you’ve used Adobe Acrobat 7.0 before, you likely know that you can mark-up your PDF files by highlighting text, underlining text, and adding comments. By selecting a commenting option and using the comment list/summary, you can give yourself a list of every word you mark up.
More details after the jump.
First, to get the comment text to show up on the list, you need to go into the Comment Preferences.
Select the box "Copy selected text into Highlight, Cross-Out, and Underline comment pop-ups." Now, when you Highlight something and mouse over it, you should see the text you highlighted in the pop-up.
After you make your comments and you’re ready to see everything you did, you have some options.
1. Comment List: showing the comment list, well, lists the comments you made. This is where checking that box in the preferences pays off because every highlight, cross out, note and underline you did is recorded, sorted by the page number, who made the comment and when, and the text that was commented on.
2. Comment Summary: displays the comments next to the page the comments are made, or displays a sheet with only the comments which you can then print or save as its own file.
There are still many things lacking in Acrobat that the ideal "highlighted notes search" program would have, such as sorting by different colors and integration with the pen, but it’s a start.
Eric, is this close? Are we getting there?
-Tracy
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Tracy: Acrobat is great if you have low-cost access to the full version. I don’t know why Adobe doesn’t include these features in Reader. I’ve come to like RepliGo, published by Cerience, a lot. The free viewer does what you’ve done w/Acrobat and files are cross-platform w/Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian, BlackBerry, and XP. You do need to get files into RepliGo format, but the print driver only costs $25-30. I’m researching how high school teachers use this and the results are pretty positive. Students are much more engaged and teachers can assess student progress much faster and deeper. Repligo is available at http://www.repligo.com. The research project website has movies, userguides, and lots of examples: http://www.iapproject.org/repligo.
October 30th, 2005 at 4:09 amHi Tracy,
Great synopsis of commenting in Acrobat. I tried it last night and it worked very well. However, I have a question regarding printing the comments page(s). When I compiled the comments and chose Summarize Comments and selected Comments Only, Acrobat created two side-by-side pages with the original document on the left and the comments on the right. The only option for printing was to print the original document with the comment pages also. Is there a way to compile the highlighted comments into a separate document and then print just the comments or summary of comments? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
BTW, I loved the paperless challenge podcasts you did with Eric. I’m attempting to go paperless as well in my businesses and the information the two of you presented was invaluable. Keep up the great work.
Yours in Health,
Barry A. Cunningha, D.C. Clinic Director Total Health Associates, Inc.
February 23rd, 2006 at 7:51 amTracy,
I have problems with OCR texts that are in columns. When I highlight it highlights the text from the adjacent column. Is there a way to tell adobe pro that the document has columns? I could not find an answer to this in the help file?
March 14th, 2006 at 1:42 pmOn personal opinion, I find this very helpful. Guys, I have also posted some more relevant info further on this, not sure if you find it useful: http://www.bidmaxhost.com/forum/
March 31st, 2007 at 12:05 amBTW, I loved the paperless challenge podcasts you did with Eric. I’m attempting to go paperless as well in my businesses and http://www.adapterlist.com the information the two of you presented was invaluable. Keep up the great work.
August 28th, 2008 at 2:07 am