CommentCollector: my new "PDF notes tool"

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Posted by quant
Dec 18, 2010 at 04:11 PM

Most of the information I work with is not on the internet in html or some other web format, but in pdf files (journals, articles, presentations, ebooks, ...). Even the files that are not in pdf and I don’t expect to edit them, I convert to pdf. This allows me to annotate them, which means I can:

- highlight/underline the text
- add text as a comment
- draw a box around some text/graph/formulas, etc

For this, I use pdf-xchange viewer. This shows all the comments in a pane, color-coded, with icons for diffent type, allows various sorting of comments etc.

So far, I prefixed my most important comments with attributes like: mytodo, mystop, etc. I had all the pdf files indexed with Archivarius, so I could easily find all those comments in my collection of thousands of pdf files.

So far, so good. The problem is with comments that I had not prefixed for various reasons. So the question was, how to find all my comments in those files?
The easiest way is just to join all pdf files, which could work for pdf files for maybe 10000 pages in total, but for larger collection, it’s hopeless. First, there isn’t any program that is able to join them in a reasonable time, and then viewing such file would be no easier task either.

I searched all over the net for the program that would extract those comments but with no luck, so I had it custom developed, for $100. I thought it would be great tool for students who study lots of papers, highlight, etc and wanted to cooperate with developer to sell it to wider audience, but they didn’t want to :(

It’s pretty simple, this is what CommentCollector does:
As an input it takes a directory name and file name, say comments.pdf
In a given directory (or the whole drive), it goes over all pdf files (recursivelly as an option) and
when it finds a file with some comments it:
- extracts all pages with comments and appends them to comments.pdf
- adds a bookmark with file name.
- to all pages in comments.pdf, it can add a link on top of the page to original file.

I was very happy when I found about 1900 comments I did over the years!
When going over the bookmarks, I can see all the files that I have ever commented, I can efforlesly go over all the comments in comments pane of pdf-xchange viewer, when clicking on the link on top of the page where I placed some comment, it will open the pdf file with that comment exactly on that page, so I can say carry on the reading, or edit the comment, etc.

For obvious reasons, I cannot post the program here, and there is no “trial version” either.
If you are interested, you can get in touch with http://www.a-pdf.com, maybe they would sell it for much less than I got it for, maybe $20 or so, I guess? Needless to say, I don’t have any profit from any sale. I just though some people might be interested.

If you have any question, please let me know.

Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 18, 2010 at 08:49 PM

As a research student, this sounds very interesting to me. I also have about a 1000 PDFs with annotations on some of them, and of course I have no idea now which are the ones that I have added comments to over the years. So I went to A-PDFs website, and lo and behold, they are now selling Comment Collector for $27 and there is even a trial version! You should definitely ask for a commission! :)

Thanks for the heads up.

doctorandus

Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 18, 2010 at 09:09 PM

I have just downloaded the trial version (which is limited to 10 PDF files to be searched). In my first 10 PDF files (out of 1351 it identified) it found 2 files that had comments. Out of these 2 files it extracted 14 pages that had comments. By the way, it also extracts highlighted text (and seemingly any other type of notation added by a software like PDF-Xchange Viewer). As far as I can see, it works like a dream. I have to have a little think about as to how to use this the most effectively. It might make sense to organise the PDF files into folders first, so that the resulting output files would be more coherent thematically. Unfortunately I can’t really do that because then I’d break the links with my EndNote software. But in any case, this definitely has its uses. Here is the URL: http://www.a-pdf.com/comment-collector/index.htm

Posted by quant
Dec 18, 2010 at 11:35 PM

Dr Andus wrote:
>... I have added comments to over the years. So I went to A-PDFs website, and lo and behold,
>they are now selling Comment Collector for $27 and there is even a trial version! You
>should definitely ask for a commission! :)

heh, I knew they would start selling it sooner or later ... I’ll go for the glory (as I don’t have other option :) )

I’m glad you like it

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Dec 24, 2010 at 04:12 PM

quant wrote:
>heh, I knew
>they would start selling it sooner or later ... I’ll go for the glory (as I don’t have
>other option :) )

Thanks for the initiative; in all honesty, I believe they should give you your investment money back as soon as they make their first $100…

It makes me think of the ideas that I’ve had for software in the past, and shared in the hope that some developer would catch the bait. No such luck as far as I know. Fortunately, most of the developers I’ve met through this forum have been very responsive to my suggestions, so there’s little I could ask for.

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