pdf highlighting tool, alternative to Acrobat
revheck
other than Adobe Acrobat?
Jan Erik Moström
> Does anyone know of a mac tool that can highlight/annotate a pdf file,
> other than Adobe Acrobat?
PDFPen <http://www.smileonmymac.com/>
jefff
couldn't handle rectangular text selection (allowing one to select just
one column of a 2-column pdf article), but the most recent version is
said to include that feature.
Another advantage over acrobat is that the text you add in the
annotations is indexed by spotlight. (this wasn't true for acrobat,
when last I tested.) You can check by putting in a made-up word in the
annotation and then saving and seeing if spotlight will find it.
Preview and PDFpen showed up, but Acrobat didn't.
Emre Akbas
Richard Karnesky
> Does anybody know of any software like PDFpen for GNU/Linux?
converting to postscript, as you'll have even more tools. Depending on
what you need to do, you might look into the following:
* flpsed <http://www.ecademix.com/JohannesHofmann/>
* PDF Edit <http://pdfedit.petricek.net/>
* KWord <http://www.koffice.org/kword/>
* Scribus <http://www.scribus.net/>
* Inkscape <http://www.inkscape.org/>
* GIMP <http://www.gimp.org/>
* pdftk <http://www.pdfhacks.com/pdftk/>
--Rick
Shane Lindsay
Its free (open source), and java based (though it feels like a native
app), so its cross platform. Not only does it replicate and extend the
functionality of pdf annotator, it also is a pretty good knock off of
MS journal and Onenote.
Lvood
revheck schrieb:
> Does anyone know of a mac tool that can highlight/annotate a pdf file,
> other than Adobe Acrobat?
Hi,
I'm also currently searching for such a tool.
Jarnal looks very promising, an alternative might be Multivalent:
http://multivalent.sourceforge.net/
.. which is also Open Source, JAVA and thus platform independant
(very important for me as I want to use it on a Windows PC and with
MacOS X.
My only problem while testing those 2 java apps on Windows XP is that
they seem to me quite slow.
Did anyone make a similar experience or are you satisfied with the
speed of Jarnal or Multivalent?
Martin
Richard Karnesky
size an complexity of the PDF) on my laptop (T43 (2GHz, 512 MB RAM)) in
windows & faster in Linux.
--Rick
Lvood
at the moment I'm trying out Jarnal and Multivalent for annotating PDF
files and I wonder if Jarnal is able to "really" recognize and select
characters, words or paragraphs in a pdf file.
Multivalent has this feature, when I highlight text in a pdf file, it
really highlights the words and I imagine that it might be possible
even to extract those selected words to a text file which could be used
as a "summary" of the pdf file.
(However, this feature seems not to be included yet, Multivalent only
saves the "coordinates" of the text selection into its *.mvd annotation
file.)
So, do you know a way in Jarnal to "really" highlight text in a pdf
file as described above?
I only found the "Yellow Highlighter" pen which draws a
semi-transparent yellow layer over anything on the pdf file but does
not recognize text as characters.
Kind regards
Martin
Richard Karnesky
Jarnal seems like a free-form note taker & would probably be nice for
tablet PCs. Actually marking up a PDF is almost an after-thought--it
puts them in as a background image layer. While there are some textual
tools, it is closer to marking up a hard copy with a pen/highlighter.
It has collaboration features and also seems to be easier to share
annotated documents with people who don't use jarnal.
Multivalent is more geared for text browsing, with some useful ways to
edit that text. There are tools to search based on selected text.
The closest thing to a free-form tool it has is a note box. It is thus
not really suitable for jotting down notes or diagrams.
Multivalent seems a bit faster, but I encountered several java errors &
was hence unable to do some things. I haven't had significant problems
with Jarnal on Linux (my primary OS), Windows, or OS X.
> I wonder if Jarnal is able to "really" recognize and select
> characters, words or paragraphs in a pdf file.
Jarnal has some ability to work with "background text." It uses
pdftotext, which looks for embedded text. You can search through the
background text & can add it as a new text layer (with somewhat mixed
results, depending on your PDF & the versions of the various programs
required for this). You can copy/paste/modify this new text layer.
Results in Multivalent were much better.
> Multivalent has this feature, when I highlight text in a pdf file, it
> really highlights the words and I imagine that it might be possible
> even to extract those selected words to a text file which could be used
> as a "summary" of the pdf file.
> (However, this feature seems not to be included yet, Multivalent only
> saves the "coordinates" of the text selection into its *.mvd annotation
> file.)
The "executive summary" seems to include both revisions you make to a
document & text blocks that you consider interesting. I think it isn't
intended to be used for a "distribution-quality" document (such as the
summary metadata in a PDF).
> So, do you know a way in Jarnal to "really" highlight text in a pdf
> file as described above?
> I only found the "Yellow Highlighter" pen which draws a
> semi-transparent yellow layer over anything on the pdf file but does
> not recognize text as characters.
I think you're correct that that is all there is.
If you need to make mostly suggestions for textual revision, can take
turns editing a document, and are working with other people who use it,
Multivalent seems like a solid choice. I often use LaTeX to prepare
papers & must convert to Word DOC for collaborators. Multivalent might
be an alternative for them to markup PDFs (but the commenting features
in Acrobat are pretty good).
If you work with images, want to simultaneously edit a document, want
to scrawl free-hand, or informally share your notes with non-jarnal
users, jarnal is a better choice. When I read a paper, I sometimes
like to draw on figures. I also don't care that highlights are
"pretty" and applied only to selected text.
--Richard Karnesky