Mac freeware for PDF Markups?

August 9, 2009 11:39 AM

MacFilter: Anyone know of a free way to add markups and comments to PDF files in OS X?

I had a copy of Acrobat Pro until this time last year and grew to love its comment and markup features for PDF files. I read lots of journal articles in PDF and putting a comment in the margins as one would with a pen in Ye Olden Dayes was a big plus. But my current employer doesn't have the budget for a license and I'm not really eager to drop the full price myself. Any suggestions? A big plus would be saving files with comments in a way that could be read by Adobe Reader later, for my students.

posted by el_lupino to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Yeah, the Preview application, which comes with all Macs, allows you to mark-up and annotate PDFs. Open a PDF in Preview, then check out the Tools menu.
posted by whimsicalnymph at 11:45 AM on August 9

if you have Leopard, the built-in Preview app offers this functionality under Tools > Annotate
posted by porn in the woods at 11:47 AM on August 9

i use skim for journal articles.
posted by hereticfig at 11:49 AM on August 9

Skim
posted by al_fresco at 11:51 AM on August 9

I have OS X 10.5.7 and Preview 4.2. This version of Preview lets you:

- Highlight text
- Add comments
- Draw rectangles and such around stuff on the page
- Add internal or external links
- Add entire PDFs or just some pages (drag a second PDF's pages into the sidebar of the main PDF)
- Delete pages (Edit | Delete selected page)
- Rearrange the pages in a PDF (drag them around in the sidebar)

There are probably other things as well but I haven't tried them. I'm not sure if the annotations can be viewed on all platforms but it would be easy to test.
posted by PatoPata at 11:51 AM on August 9

Apologies, I should have said I knew about Preview. It has annotations and they port over to Reader, but the tools themselves are pretty limited. Skim is actually closer to what I had in mind, though I'm still trying to figure out a good way to port over to Reader.
posted by el_lupino at 12:27 PM on August 9

Skim or Formulate Pro.
posted by LuckySeven~ at 12:27 PM on August 9

To read skim markups in Reader (or Preview), you'll need to re-print them as a PDF which is, obviously, less than ideal.

(Hit Cmd-P, go to the PDF menu in the lower left and select "Save as PDF".)
posted by 47triple2 at 10:33 AM on August 10