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PDF Briefing: Commenting tools in Adobe Acrobat. By Simon Hurst

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13th Feb 2007
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Introduction
Paper might be pretty useless as a method of storing data, but it does have the great benefit that you can scribble notes all over it, and distribute it around an organisation for others to add their comments. As we move away from using paper, it's important that the tools are available to allow users to work on electronic documents in the same way that they used to work on paper ones.

Adobe Acrobat includes a full set of review and commenting tools that far exceed the capabilities of a biro, post-it notes and a highlighter pen. In this article we will look at how to use the commenting tools but we will leave details of the full review process to another time.

To start with, we will look at how to enable users who just have access to the free Adobe Reader to use the commenting tools. A user with access to Acrobat Professional can use the 'Enable for Commenting and Analysis in Adobe Reader…' option on the Comments menu to change the properties of the current PDF document to allow Adobe Readers to add comments to that document. In the screen below, we can see such a document opened in Adobe Reader. A message beneath the toolbar area shows that 'You can add comments and markups to this document', and the Commenting and Highlighting toolbars are visible. If you don't have access to Acrobat Professional, we have included a commenting-enabled PDF file for you to practise on: Download Comment-enabled-file.pdf.

Range of commenting tools
Let's first of all look at the range of commenting tools available. As well as the ability to indicate text edits, documents can be annotated with notes and with virtual rubber 'stamps'. There is also a set of drawing mark-up tools that includes call-outs, text boxes and lines and shapes. It is also possible to attach separate files as 'comments' and to record and include audio comments.

In addition to the process of annotating the document, it is important to be able to manage the annotations, particularly where several different people are involved in the review process. Acrobat allows you to choose which comments to display by several criteria: type of comment, comment author and status. A Comments List pane can also be displayed and this includes a toolbar containing the tools necessary to manage the comments.

We will look at the main types of comment in turn and, to cater for those using Adobe Reader rather than Acrobat, we will concentrate on the Commenting Toolbar which is available in both Acrobat and Adobe Reader for an appropriately enabled PDF document.

Notes
Perhaps the most obvious type of comment is a note. To add a note to an existing document you can either choose the Add a Note option from the Comments menu or click on the Note Tool on the Commenting Toolbar. If the Commenting Toolbar is not already visible, you can display it by ticking the Commenting option on the View, Toolbars submenu.

We'll use the Note Tool option. When you click the Note Tool button the cursor will change to the note insertion cursor and you can then click on the position in the document to which you wish to attach a note. A note icon will appear where you click and a note pop-up window will also appear allowing you to type in the note text. You can copy text from the document and paste it into the note pop-up, and you can also use common text attributes such as bold and italic within the note. Click on the Options button within the note pop-up window, or right click anywhere in the pop-up, to access further note options. The Properties option allows you to change the note icon, colour and opacity as shown below:

When you have set the content and appearance of the note you can either leave the pop-up displayed, or click on the close button to close it. If you do close the pop-up, the note icon will remain visible and in place. Hover over a note icon to view the note contents or click on the note icon to display the pop-up again – this will allow you to edit, or reply to a note, as well as to view the contents. To delete a note, simply right click on the note icon or note pop-up and choose delete from the shortcut menu.

Text edits
There are several ways to indicate text edits within a PDF document. You can select the text using the normal text 'Select' tool and then right click on the selected text to choose from the various '(Comment)' options on the shortcut menu:

There is also a dropdown button at the right of the Text Edits tool on the Commenting Toolbar. Having selected the required text, you can click on this dropdown to choose from a full list of text edit options:

Alternatively, click on the 'Text Edits' tool itself. You can then select the required section of text and press Delete or Backspace on the keyboard to mark the text as to be deleted, or type in replacement text. To insert additional text, turn the 'Text Edits' tool on in the same way, then click in the document where you need the text to be inserted, and type in the new text. The 'Text Edits' tool will remain selected until you choose one of the other selection tools.

Stamps
It might lack the satisfying thud of rubber stamp on paper, but Acrobat includes a very comprehensive set of electronic rubber stamp equivalents, and even lets you create your own custom stamps. Stamps are available via the Stamp Tool and associated dropdown button on the Commenting Toolbar and via the Commenting Tools option of the main Comments menu. Click on the Stamp Tool dropdown to see the different categories of stamps available:

As you can see, the dynamic stamps can include system details such as the user name and organisation, and the current time and date. Other categories of stamp allow you to indicate where particular signatures should be placed and also include a range of 'Standard Business' stamps such as 'Draft', 'Confidential' and 'Approved'.

If the default collection of stamps is insufficient for your requirements, you can create one off stamps from an image on the clipboard by selecting the 'Paste Clipboard Image as Stamp Tool' option or create your own 'Custom Stamps'. To create a custom stamp, choose the 'Create Custom Stamp' option from the stamp menu. This will allow you to browse to an image file, an existing PDF document, or one of the document types that Acrobat can convert to a PDF file. Once you have chosen the file, you then choose which existing category to store it in, or you can create a new category, and then give the stamp a name. When you click the OK button, your new stamp will be added to your chosen category and will be available for use in the same way as the default stamps.

Other text tools
Continuing our voyage through the Acrobat Commenting Toolbar, we come to a collection of three text tools – the Highlight Text Tool, the Underline Text Tool and the Cross-Out Text Tool. Just select the appropriate tool from the dropdown and then select the text to which to apply the chosen 'comment' type. As with other comment types, you can right click on text marked up in this way to edit or delete the comment, add a note pop-up, or to use the properties option to change the colour and, for underlines, style of the comment.

Files and audio
The final two types of comment available on the toolbar are attached files and recorded audio. The Attach a File as a Comment button allows you to click in the chosen place in your existing document to place your file attachment icon, you can then browse to choose the file to attach, and finally chosen which icon to use, and its colour. Once you have attached a file as a comment, you can hover over the icon to see the name of the attached file, or double click on the icon to open the attachment.

The 'Record Audio Comment' works in a similar way. You click at the required location in the document, you can then use a microphone attached to your system to record your comment. Again you have a choice of icon style and colour, and you can double click on the audio icon to play back the recorded audio.

Managing comments
The final button on the Commenting Toolbar is the Show button. Most of the options available from this button control how existing comments are displayed, but before we deal with those, we'll quickly cover the Drawing Markup Toolbar. This toolbar includes a series of lines, circles and shapes that you can add to your document:

The drop down next to the 'Arrow Tool' displays a list of different drawing tools:

Now let's look at the comment display options:

Comments can be identified by Type; Reviewer (by default, comments are marked with the Log-in name of the author); Status and Checked State. There are two types of status: Review (None, Accepted, Rejected, Cancelled, Completed) and Migration (None, Not Confirmed, Confirmed). The 'Show' menu allows you to choose exactly which comments to display according to the categories described above.

As we stated in the introduction to this article, Acrobat provides a full set of tools for the management of comments. One of the best ways to access the management tools is by displaying the Comments List. Click the Comments List option on the show menu. This will display an additional pane at the bottom of the Acrobat window:

As we can see, our comments or attachments are listed vertically and the Comments List includes a tool bar that allows us to scroll forwards and backwards through each comment. We can Reply to comments, delete them, set their Status and mark them as Checked or Unchecked. The Show button displays the same options as the equivalent option on the Commenting Toolbar. We can also Sort by any of the comment attributes, Search for particular text in a comment, and 'Print' a summary of our comments to a printer or to a separate PDF file. Finally, the Options button allows you to specify the format of the comment summary, Import and Export comments and to use the comment 'Tracker'.

Import and Export comments
Note that from Adobe Reader, you can only export selected comments to a special type of Acrobat file – an FDF file – and not to a Word document.

If you are participating in an email or browser-based review there is no need to use import and export to send and receive comments – this will be done automatically as part of the review process. Import and Export can be used to deal with comments included in documents that are not part of a review process.

The Import option allows you to import comments from PDF or other supported file types into the current PDF document. Acrobat will do as good a job as it can of matching comments to the appropriate places in the destination document.

As well as importing comments, Acrobat can also export comments to a Word (or indeed AutoCad) file. This option will only work properly if the Word file is the original file from which the PDF was created using Adobe's PDFMaker, and with the option to include tags turned on. On choosing to export comments to a Word file, Word will be opened and a help screen explaining how the comments will be treated will be displayed. Clicking on OK will then display the Import Comments option screen:

After the appropriate options have been set, the continue button will import the comments into the Word document. In the case of the Text Edits, you will be offered a further option to let the import routine help you 'integrate' the text changes into your document:

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By User deleted
15th Feb 2007 12:49

A neat PDF facility ......
with pdf files is that one can jump directly to either:

- Specified Page = .. href=MyDoc.pdf#page=3>page3

- Destination_String = .. href=MyDoc.pdf#reference_name>reference name

from an external source. This makes external indexing etc. very simple

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