Working with Pdfs (Adobe isn’t the only option)
I was talking with a faculty member the other day who was complaining about being sent a .pdf, as he was unable to “edit” it in any way, he wanted the more friendly Microsoft Word document. (If you don’t know what a .pdf is click here, most of the “professional” documents you get are in this form, like journal articles.) After making the point that there is nothing friendly about Word, I asked him to explain more. And then I realized his concern. I think a lot of people assume that you cannot edit .pdfs because they use either Adobe Reader or Preview. There are in fact programs which let you edit .pdfs and this can be of significant use. Consider:
- You could use such an application to take notes directly on those articles you download from JSTOR, Project Muse or other such journal databases.
- Many publishers will send you proofs as a .pdf, you could make corrections directly on the proof, rather than writing a separate document.
- Many sites allow you to download brochures, maps, fliers, etc. in .pdf form, this way you can make notes straight on the file.
- In fact you could require your students to submit everything as a .pdf and comment directly on the papers, sending them back to the students. This would replicate the “writing in the margins effect” while keeping everything digital. One of the authors on The Unofficial Apple Weblog does this, as he outlines in this post.
What You Can Use
As the above post from The Unofficial Apple Weblog outlines there are two paid options, PdfClerk and PdfPen. I have used both, and really don’t have a preference, and this post does a good job of covering the differences, so I am not going to get into it here, but . . .
As several people have emailed (thanks especially to Curt and Ryan) there is a FREE option for Mac users, that is also open source: Skim. While it is still in beta, and not as robust as the above two it is FREE. You can read reviews here and here. Apparently this is made from the folks who made Bibdesk, so it has good lineage, and although it is still in Beta one can expect that it will continue to develop.
All of these are for the Mac, but if you are a PC user you can try Scribus or check out this list at Wikipedia.
April 8th, 2007 at 3:30 am
On the PC side, there’s also Foxit Reader, which has both a free and paid option. Both versions let you annotate, highlight, make notes (either in a note you have to click to see or in a directly-on-the-sheet typewriter option), etc. I think the only difference between free and paid, actually, is that the free one puts a watermark at the top advertising Foxit Reader. Certainly that doesn’t bother me for my own note-taking–for your student-paper suggestion, might it be more of a concern. It also has a smaller memory footprint than Adobe’s software.
April 8th, 2007 at 8:37 am
Apple’s preview in Tiger does allow you to annotate PDFs - you can’t change the underlying text but you can add comments and circle text. I think the resulting changes can be read by non-Preview users.
There are a large number of PDF-related utilities and other useful things to look at at PDFZone. I found a couple of PC PDF reading and editing tools there including Ghostview which is free and open source (GPL in fact).
April 8th, 2007 at 9:45 am
Interesting post.
I just want to mention that there are also two platform-independant, open-source programs which can annotate pdf files and more:
Jarnal (http://www.dklevine.com/general/software/tc1000/jarnal.htm)
and Multivalent (http://multivalent.sourceforge.net/)
I tried them out under Windows XP and their functionality is very interesting. However, In my opinion there is a certain lack of performance and stability.
Nevertheless, I’d like to encourage anyone interested in editing or annotating pdfs for free, to try them out.
April 8th, 2007 at 10:41 am
Thanks a lot! This post was exactly what I was looking for, as Adobe Professional is way above my budget. I have immediately downloaded Skim, although it still appears a bit buggy, it is very promising. I especially love the full screen and presentation options.
Paul
April 8th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
David, is there a way to do more than annotate with Tiger? I have never found one. The main thing I want though, which the version of Skim I have doesn’t yet have, but it looks to be coming, is the ability to highlight a line.
October 18th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
[...] Practically everyone uses PDF files, whether it is reading a paper or article that someone has sent you, or downloading something from JSTOR, Google Books, Hebrew Books, Project Muse, or similar sites, many people don’t organize their PDF’s very well. While you can simply keep them in different folders and view them with Adobe Reader, Foxit (PC), or Preview (Mac),there are a number of programs which make organizing and viewing PDF’s much easier. There are also programs which will allow you to edit PDF’s, and you can read about those here and here. [...]
June 11th, 2008 at 1:46 am
Thanks for sharing! Very useful article. I wanna add one thing. I use http://www.PDFfiller.com as a pdf tool. It`s much less expensive then Adobe Acrobat. I like it.