still looking for decent PDF annotation tool

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 21 Jan 2011, Arnaud G wrote:

> I know it's not free but I do a lot of pdf work and find it
> excellent. PDF studio from qoppa
> http://www.qoppa.com/pdfstudio/index.html

  ok, i'll check into that but at the risk of annoying by way of
repetition, let me describe clearly what i'm after and others can let
me know if they have actually *used* something that constitutes a
solution (you'll see what i mean by that shortly).

  i proofread a number of sizable word documents from a certain
publisher and the pattern until now has been to open these docs in
openoffice (3.2 in my case), go into Edit > Changes, then select both
"Record" and "Show", for obvious reasons.

  i then start proofreading and all of my feedback falls into two
categories:

  * short, in-place edits, where the fact that a line has been changed
is visually obvious by a mark (vertical bar) in the margin, and

  * longer comments added on the right side, using Ctl+Alt+N (insert >
comment), for which i use the word "annotate"

and that's it -- i have no need of any other changes to the document
i'm reviewing.  and when i'm done, i save it back to the original doc
format, and email it back.

  occasionally, i'm handed a PDF file and i would like to be able to
do the same thing -- precisely those two operations, or as close as i
can get to them so, occasionally, i end up googling on some
combination of "ubuntu pdf file edit annotate".  and while there are
always a number of alleged solutions, not all of them work.

  example 1: many places happily suggest that you can edit PDF files
from within oodraw as long as you add oracle's "PDFimport" plugin.
good luck with that.  i've installed the plugin in oodraw, then tried
to open a simple PDF file, only to get:

  General Error.
  General input/output error.

what numerous web pages claim should just work does *not*, in fact,
just plain work.  so much for oodraw.

  as for okular, that looks promising but let's read here:

http://okular.kde.org/faq.php

"How can I annotate a document and send it to a friend/colleague/etc?

"Since KDE 4.2, Okular has the "document archiving" feature. This is
an Okular-specific format for carrying the document plus various
metadata related to it (currently only annotations). You can save a
"document archive" from the open document by choosing "File -> Export
As -> Document Archive". To open an Okular document archive, just open
it with Okular as it would be eg a PDF document"

  so that sounds like, if i annotate a PDF file with okular, i have to
save it in an okular-specific format, so that the recipient must
*also* install okular.  not a big deal, i can just tell the recipient
to do that, but it just adds that extra requirement.  am i
understanding that correctly?

rday

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
LinkedIn:                               http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
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