Comments on: Working with Pdfs (Adobe isn’t the only option)

By: Patty

Patty — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:46:57 +0000

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.

By: Organizing PDF’s

Organizing PDF’s — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 13:41:30 +0000

[...] 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. [...]

By: dave

dave — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 15:04:08 +0000

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.

By: Paul Gill

Paul Gill — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 10:41:02 +0000

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

By: Lvood

Lvood — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 09:45:24 +0000

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.

By: David Brake

David Brake — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 08:37:23 +0000

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).

By: Jandy

Jandy — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 03:30:13 +0000

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.