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PDF documents - is there a good tool for remote collaboration: highlightings, annotations, comments, notes?
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Posted by sciagent
Dec 13, 2013 at 12:33 PM
Hello everybody!
For few years I read this forum and found it very interesting. Let me express my gratitude to all participants of interesting and informative discussions I found here.
Like many of you, I work with information, and trying to overcome the information overhead.
Now I experience the following need: I have a pile of PDF documents, and would like to work on them with my colleagues (who are located in different countries) by sharing our highlightings, annotations, comments, and notes. Is there a good (freeware – better – or reasonably-priced) tool available that allows to do that?
I know that Adobe Acrobat does that, but it is too expensive.
I know that it is possible to convert PDF into DOCX with MS World 2013, and then – share the document for online collaboration via SkyDrive, but this is not a fast and convenient way. In addition to that, not all universities use MS Office as our university does.
I tried Mendeley, one of the reference tools I use, but sharing does not work properly in the most recent version (1.10.1).
Any suggestions?
Posted by quant
Dec 14, 2013 at 09:06 PM
have no idea whether this can what you need, but you might give it a try
http://spoon.net/apps/pdf-xchange-viewer
Posted by Hillman
Dec 15, 2013 at 03:11 AM
Yes. Have a go at PDF Fusion from Corel. You can download a trial. The software costs some US$40. They call it “The all-in-one PDF toolkit”. Good luck!
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Dec 15, 2013 at 11:46 AM
If you and your colleagues all have Microsoft Office installed on your computers, you probably all have access to OneNote. If so, ON can handle this pretty easily, I believe (I haven’t tried it myself), by setting up a shared notebook in the cloud, printing the PDFs into the notebook and then annotating it. I believe this is pretty doable, but as I said, I have not tried it.
Steve Z.
Posted by sciagent
Dec 15, 2013 at 09:41 PM
Thanks for all inputs!
quant, I tried the PDF-XChange Viewer. It really provides a nice selection of tools. But just-in-time sharing of the result of work is still a problem.
The same is with Corel PDF Fusion, Hillman. It is possible to export comments (fdf), or email them, but it dies not imply a real time collaborative work.
Steve, unfortunately all my colleagues are not able to use MS Office: different universities around the world have different policies, and in addition to that people use different operating systems.
Another inconvenience associated with a use of MS Office 2013 to work on PDF documents is a necessity of conversion. Then layout of the document is not fixed (e.g. it depends on fonts, margins, etc.), and after editing one may find that certain information is not located anymore on the same pages as in original document. That is not desirable.
I suppose it has to be some kind of online service with (supporting main OSs/ecosystems) browser or desktop/mobile applications/clients…
Well, search continues:)