Help with Document Annotation

March 12, 2012 5:12 AM

I'm looking for an application that would allow me to load a document into it, and then annotate that document from drop-down menus. I want to be able to customize the content of those menus.

Lets' say someone sends me document, I load it into this application, and I find a sentence that is much too verbose. I want to be able to highlight that sentence, right-click on it, and select "Verbose."

I then want to be able to save that document, and then email it to the author with my annotation "verbose" saved within the document. Maybe my annotations are revealed by different colored text or by tooltips, or both. It would be nice to combine this with document revisions, and with the ability to add explanatory notes whenever the simple annotation wasn't enough.

Does such application already exist, preferably multi-platform and Open Source?

Thanks in advance.

posted by Chasuk to Writing & Language (1 answer total)

Best answer: Well, it's not exactly what you asked for, but both LibreOffice and Microsoft Word support adding comments. Comments do what you asked for, except for the drop-down part - the comment isn't part of the text, it's outside of the text. So in your example, you would select the verbose sentence, click "Insert comment," and type "Verbose." The comment is added in the margin, not in the text itself, and is pretty obvious because it gets a colored background.

I don't have something that does this with drop-down menus. If you don't find something that uses drop-downs, you could just use comments and type short comments like "verbose" and "run-on." And since you mentioned explanatory notes, you can always just type more in the comment if it's needed.
posted by Tehhund at 8:05 AM on March 12, 2012