still looking for decent PDF annotation tool

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 21 Jan 2011, Tony Pursell wrote:

> On Fri, 2011-01-21 at 12:33 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > On Fri, 21 Jan 2011, Tony Pursell wrote:
> >
> > > I think the whole problem of PDF files is that they are designed
> > > to be immutable objects - so any form of annotation that changes
> > > the PDF itself should be impossible.  For someone to send you a
> > > PDF for annotation is completely wrong and misses the point of
> > > having PDFs in the first place, so they should not object to
> > > having your annotations and edits sent back to them in some
> > > other format.
> > >
> > > So any method of annotation is going to be a bit of a botch.
> >
> >   so, out of curiosity, how does adobe reader work?  a colleague
> > tells me she has the commercial adobe reader on her mac, and she
> > can annotate PDFs just fine.  so what is adobe reader doing to
> > that file?
>
> I assume that is the paid for version from Adobe (called Adobe
> Acrobat - the free version is Adobe Acrobat Reader) that is also a
> PDF creation & edit tool. It costs £532.80 here in the UK and is
> only available for Windows and Mac.

  my colleague describes what she has as the "fully paid Adobe Reader
package" on a mac, so it sounds like what you're describing.  but my
question sort of remains -- what is it that is embedded in that
product that is so difficult to find in an OSS utility?  is it a
licensing issue?  a reverse-engineering issue?  am i just not
understanding the fundamental problem here?  sorry if i'm being
utterly clueless.

rday

-- 

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

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