Highlighting PDF Docs

February 20, 2006 4:20 PM

Is there any cheap and easy way to highlight or underline PDF documents? I do a lot of research, and I'd like to be able to tag important points in some way.

I know that you can copy in Acrobat Reader and paste into a word document, which is what I usually do, but I hate to lose the context. I've tried programs like FoxIt Reader, which enable you to add comments, but there's often no room in the pdf's for comments and they don't really enable me to quickly find important parts of the document.

One other wrinkle is the fact that some things I read were converted from text documents, so pdf readers recognize the text while most were scanned in so pdf readers only recognize an image.

I'm hoping you guys might know of some program that would help me do this -- preferably free or affordable ($30 or less, which leaves Acrobat Pro out of contention).

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

I don't know much about it, but some creative google-fu found me PDF Painter which is free - or a mere $14.95 to register though if you don't mind highlighting in blue - you could use the free version.

I can't speak to whether the interface is nice and easy, etc, since I just found it - but I hope that helps.
posted by twiggy at 4:23 PM on February 20, 2006

How about pdf annotator: http://www.ograhl.com/en/pdfannotator/screenshots.php

or

solid pdf and then annotate in word

not free ($50), either of them though
posted by JeNeSaisQuoi at 5:02 PM on February 20, 2006

Acrobat has those tools, just not the free version. Isn’t this the obvious solution?
posted by joeclark at 5:37 PM on February 20, 2006

OSX: Preview
posted by michaelkuznet at 5:43 PM on February 20, 2006

joeclark - what version do we need? The site is not that clear. Pro is $$$!
posted by arh07 at 6:18 PM on February 20, 2006

You need standard. 99 bucks.
posted by disclaimer at 7:10 PM on February 20, 2006

You can use Foxit PDF Editor for free, but it adds a watermark on each modified page.
posted by Sharcho at 10:57 AM on February 21, 2006

I've been using PDF annotator on my tablet PC for the last couple of weeks. It works, but it's not the best piece of software ever. The rendering engine is obviously worse than that used by the adobe reader. I am reading scientific papers, and oftentime I need to run the adobe reader to figure out what the captions to diagrams say. It also does not allow you to select text to copy/paste, which is a huge drawback to me. On the other hand, highlighting and handwriting work reasonably well. The trial version adds a header on every page, and only works for 30 days anyway.

I do wish someone would write a quality tablet pc PDF reader. There are a number of features one could implement that's make the app/hardware a killer combo.
posted by blindcarboncopy at 11:11 PM on February 21, 2006