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?

have no idea whether this can what you need, but you might give it a try
http://spoon.net/apps/pdf-xchange-viewer

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!

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.

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:)

Well, maybe this could be something you are looking for? http://www.nitropdf.com/cloud-connectivity It says: "Sign, share, and save documents directly to the Cloud so you can collaborate easily with anyone, anywhere." Sounds scary to me but contains all the buzzwords we are looking for. I use Adobe Acrobat XI Pro, BTW, and am very happy. Also remember: With Adobe Acrobat, you get the best quality PDFs as well as the smallest. But then again, as you correctly wrote, it is quite expensive.

I'm seeing two major requirements: group access to a library of PDFs, and collation (somehow) of annotations. On the second requirement: given the constraints mentioned in your latest post, perhaps you could elaborate a bit on what you're expecting from "sharing our highlightings, etc." -- do you mean everyone is working in the same document and adding their notes and comments to that single instance of a PDF? Or is everyone working on their own instance and you and your colleagues are willing to work with multiple sets of markups? Or somewhere in between?

If your collaboration is toward the "one-instance-per-person" end of the spectrum, then perhaps the first requirement could be met simply: get a (free) Dropbox or Box or other cloud-like account and store the PDFs in folders there. You could work out a folder-and-naming scheme among your colleagues to indicate who worked on what instance of a PDF. And your colleagues would rely on their own software for doing the markups and annotations -- as long as the annotations are Acrobat-compliant and therefore readable by whatever software your colleagues use.

sciagent wrote

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.

Hillman, yes, it really contains:) Still a price tag is too high. Under a current economical situation I just cannot drop to few of my colleagues something like: "Would you spend a bit above a hundred euros to one more tool, or ask your university to do that?" I afraid even expenditure of 40 euros is not justified - at least while we speak of a piece of software that does not replace few of the convenient tools by offering something better.

Yes, everything you said about the Acrobat is true, but you see above...

Paul, thank you for a request for clarification. I really meant the case when few collaborators work on the same document, and result of the work is seen by everyone immediately. And it is important to maintain the layout of the original document (particularly, page numbers) - to be able to discuss of the document with outsiders who are aware of the document. Documents are complicated (a mixture of text, figures, illustrations, and tables), often are having more than 100 pages, where some of those are rotated.

There are few commercial solutions, but do not seem to be affordable:
Crocodoc
A.nnotate.com
GroupDocs Annotation

And free, but not provide a required functionality:
PDFescape (a free version is limited - up-to 100 pages; annotation tools are not convenient)
PDFzen (does not save annotations)

sciagent wrote:

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.

I wasn't suggesting pdf-xchange viewer on its own, but pdf xchange viewer RUN in the spoon.net service. Have you tried that?

Seems that even adobe reader might be able to do that
https://spoon.net/apps/adobereader-10.1

It says:
"Adobe Reader allows a more secure way to view, print, search, sign, verify, and collaborate on PDF documents"

quant, it seems that I didn't get an idea of how to use the spoon.net service for the need we discuss. They offer a virtual desktop where you can install (select from a list of freeware they have, or install your own, licensed) up to five applications for free.

When few people need to work on one document at the same time, and everybody's input has to be seen to every of them as soon as it is made - how the spoon.net service will help?

I checked the Adobe Reader before, and could there any meant for a collaborative work. The only relevant option was:
Share Files Using SendNow Online...
which just uploads your file - and you can share a link to it.

Here:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/shared-pdf-document-reviews.html
it is seen that "Streamline document reviews and approvals" are available in Acrobat XI Standard and Pro version only.

"could there" -> "could not find there" - an example of how such distraction as an incoming call may affect :)

It sounds to me like you may have some contradictory requirements. On the one hand, you want to use PDF because it preserves format and it's ubiquitous. On the other, you want to do real-time collaboration on these PDFs.

However, the PDF format is not that great for annotation by multiple parties. Even highlights and comments by just one person (unless it's sparingly done) can completely overwhelm a PDF document and make it difficult to work with.

One compromise could be for one person in the network to scan the PDFs into some open document format (or just plain text) (ABBYY FineReader Pro can do a good job of that), and then use a dedicated multi-platform collaboration service for the annotation.

Draft (https://draftin.com/ comes to mind, though I've never tried them, so I don't know how good they really are. Or Google Docs: http://www.google.com/google-d-s/tour2.html I'm sure there are more.

Dr Andus, original documents come in PDF format (e.g. research reports, or official documents of calls for research funding). Those are publicly-available, and many people work with them (e.g. official documents of Horizon 2020 EU programme - thousands of people study those). Negotiations about a future consortium (or just discussions with colleagues) usually start in small groups (2-4, sometimes up to 8-12 people). For years we used to exchange our thoughts via closed email groups (this form of processing the document is far from real time and is not convenient), or shared via Dropbox those original documents with our comments (sometimes mess comes through), or extractions from those - via GoogleDocs/SkyDrive/... - what ever else (that is good for later phases, when the document is processed entirely, but in some cases that happens after months of work). Also, it is easier to discuss of the same documents with people outside of the closed group when you share with them the well-known document with your annotations, or - in some cases - just by using the same pointers (page numbers are often useful - in addition to headers).

Therefore I decided to figure out a new form of collaboration. Preserving a formatting is important - in accordance to my experience so far. I hope that PDF documents will not be too much overwhelmed with annotations as we used to annotate them, not that much though. People who are typically involved into the work we discuss are usually busy and careful with something (radically) new that change a usual order of things. Thus the new form has to be easy to adopt.

A possible solution is found though. When an annotated document is sent for shared review from Adobe Acrobat Standard/Pro (menu View, selection Comment, and option Review will bring of the same name panel where Send for Shared Review, Send for Email Review, and Track Reviews options are), it really can be edited then with Acrobat Reader (one needs to have/open account at their site, as Adobe ID is used for authentication, and the document is shared via Adobe Workspace). While editing, at the top of the working area, info field and three buttons will be available. Those buttons are: Check for New Comments, Publish Comments, and a drop-down list (Track Reviews, Save as Archive Copy, and Work Offline). Annotation tools and a list of comments are available then among other panels on the right from the working area. Preliminary tests showed that with some latency for upload-download and essential delays between submissions, a collaborative annotating is possible in a group of two. Let's see how tests in a larger group will go...

I commented on this collaboration/versioning prob here:

http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/vole-word-reviewer

I can't offer any solution but it seems some approaches might become more fruitful than others for finding something adequate... but which never could be available for cheap. Perhaps a solution with one "integration server" application, and then several "collaboration clients" (push and get, at a much lesser cost per seat) could become envisionable.

Thank you for the pdf links, sciagent, all products you mentioned were formerly unknown to me.

I just found the most weird (well, academic background from Austria, so... - and presumably most advanced) editor of them all:

CTE = Classical Text Editor

with an almost incredible set of useful features indeed:

http://cte.oeaw.ac.at/?id0=features

No price available though; as the French say, le prix serait-il à la tête du client ?

It's a weird thing for which it seems you need some sort of "personal introduction", similar to those ancient "oral-only" languages (of which most are dead today, for this very reason), have a look into this link, of which I permit myself to cite one commentary in full here ( c'est pour la bonne cause, n'est-ce pas ? ) :

http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2010/03/01/classical-text-editor-useful/

hank
I don’t think it is too easy to figure out by yourself. I’ve just learned how to use it but with the help of someone who already knew it. The big advantage to it, in my opinion, is the ease with which you can note variants. You type in your base text from one ms, and then read through another and when you have a variant, you click on the annotation button and you type it in. The variant is anchored to the word or words in the main text that you had highlighted, and when you print it, you get a nice set of annotations that are automatically produced. If you want, you can even have a couple of sets of annotations and notes. Doing this work on a regular word processor would be almost impossible. I don’t know what your text is, but if you have everything done and your problem is typesetting and how things will look on the printed page, then I don’t think CTE will help you very much. If you’re producing a critical edition from several manuscripts with a large number of variants and notes, then it will help you a ton.
Comment on Aug 12th, 2010 at 7:55 pm

I think, though, that this tool is of the utmost interest for the above subject I permitted myself to broadly broaden with my above intervention. Of course, the fact that no price is given, is awful and could mean they ask you precisely what you want to use it for, then set up a contract permitting just that precise use you explained to them, and anything even very far to "commercial" would get a 4-digit licence price per seat. Serais-je parano ?

That would have been "anything even very far RELATED to “commercial”"

And what about this link here:

http://www.indoition.com/text-processing-dtp-tools.htm :

"SmartDocs
Adds functions to manage and reuse content from within Microsoft Word documents.
Price: approx. $695 per user per year"

That's what I call completely crazy.

But it's a good link for more such stuff.

Of course, a good versioning/collaboration system needs to trace deliberate alterations of colleagues' work, for an example see the second commentary here:

http://funnyexam.com/answers/popular/51768-and-i-love-pus-y-thumbs

In corporate life, such alterations ain't done in this obvious manner, but there are reports of e.g. replacing right numbers with wrong ones, and similar, to make your opponent look a dumbo.

(Speaking of gold mines... http://funnyexam.com/answers/popular/43708-ain-t-gettin-my-leaves-be and many more, allow this one more, please http://funnyexam.com/answers/popular/12367-translation-i-m-not-doin (I suppose those chars are con chars))

Live links, and virtual docs gathered by run-time

Several times, I mentioned broken links, cf. file system synching in Ultra Recall (which is one of the best solutions currently available though). By accident, I just discovered obscure sw and a DC remark on it which I'd like to share in order to show that even 10 and more ago, live links to the file system were possible in non-file managers.

It's a Chinese corporation with the url www.evermore.com . They did a text processor within their EIOffice, from 2001, see www.eioffice.com . Now they call their office suite Yozo Office (60$, I had never heard of any of these here): www.yozooffice.com

The clue being to found here: http://www.donationcoder.com/Reviews/Archive/WordProcs/#part_2 : "Live links are easy to create, impossible to break. Unlike any other word processor, you can create a link between documents and document types. Just copy (bookmark, URL, spreadsheet, formula, cell reference) and paste (as link). You can change the link source all day and it will still retain the link intelligently!"

Hence, two things: This "proves" (in fact, no proof needed, it was evident as such) that outliners, too, could do the same.

And (please read the DC citation again), it's a very good idea for the present collaboration/versioning sw task: Have a max of "sources" in separate files (or db records), and then build up your different doc versions by a kind of "link tables", in run time. Why not have "virtual documents" consisting of just a "fill-it-up table", and then fetching their content from hundreds of independent elements (which then can appear in any order, in any combination, in any such document)?

Just the same principle as I see outliners with multiple trees and their respective content items, those not "belonging" to this or that tree in the db, but just referenced to, from these trees.

Both outlining, and collaboration/versioning, are chaos M, and you will not clear it out but by SEPARATING THE ELEMENTS FROM THE DOCUMENT.

Sciagent wrote:

There are few commercial solutions, but do not seem to be affordable:
Crocodoc
A.nnotate.com
GroupDocs Annotation

Thanks for the heads up on these offerings. I was not aware of any, and I find a.nnotate.com in particular very attractive and excellent value: you only pay for 'uploaders', whereas you may have an infinite number of free 'annotators' at no additional charge.

As someone who makes a living in a market very similar to yours, I must say that, from my personal experience, there's no free lunch, I.e. no tool would offer the kind of functionality that you want for free. Even if you do find something that seems to fullfil your expectations at no cost, it won't be for long. The market for professional online collaboration is still in transition and many companies are still searching for their permanent business model. Yes, even Adobe.

I should add that I strongly believe that professionals should be willing to pay for the development of their tools, in the same way that they expect to be paid for their own intellectual work.

I focus on the intellectual labour market because only in this domain have we been spoilt to expect something for nothing. I know of no manual labourer who has ever expected his/her tool to be provided for free, be it a tractor or a screwdriver. But the fact that information reproduction is very cheap, doesn't reduce the effort required for its creation.

If you're a PDF-Xchange Viewer PRO user, you probably know that Tracker Software recently provided a free licence to the next product in line called PDF-Xchange Editor (which can install separately, so you can have both).

I'm wondering if anyone else has tried Editor and what you think about it. I've been using it for a few weeks but I'm still not convinced and keep going back to Viewer. Editor does seem to have a more sophisticated search tool, but otherwise I can't see a huge difference. Am I missing something?

Here is the description of the product:
http://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor

Unfortunately they haven't updated the comparison chart yet, so it's not immediately obvious how Editor is different:
http://www.tracker-software.com/pdf-xchange-products-comparison-chart

"I focus on the intellectual labour market because only in this domain have we been spoilt to expect something for nothing. I know of no manual labourer who has ever expected his/her tool to be provided for free, be it a tractor or a screwdriver. But the fact that information reproduction is very cheap, doesn’t reduce the effort required for its creation."

Well, that's simplifying. In fact, for any tractor/screwdriver, there is a specific cost of production, and thus a specific profit margin (depending on scale, and of other factors, of course) - in sw/info/creation, there is no such relationship.

As we all know, this has made the fortune of Billyboy, and all that money he today gives out to Africa and to whatever it may be (some people who are more interested in his today's doings call him a "killer", a "murderer", so it seems they are not d'accord with his choices to spend money), HE STOLE FROM ALL OF US, by charging his products way too high - on the other hand, whenever it was suitable to throw away his products, for a time, or for specific user groups for some time, he and his men did so, in order to "get the market", fully, i.e. in order to ruin possible alternatives.

Mr. Jain invariably touting his products here, he's right in not wanting to give away his work; it's just "the market", i.e. the immediate competition's prices that makes his prices appear rather "high". Also, many developers live in third-world countries (e.g. Bulgaria ;-) ) where regular families live on 200 euro a month, at best, and they "profit" from a MyInfo price of 100 dollars plus VAT much more than would profit a US developer from Ultra Recall's 100 dollars plus VAT; on arrival, the first might seem "overpriced", whilst the second one might appear "cheap" (and that explains at least some of the differences in motivation for both developers).

Now back to tractors and screwdrivers: You, as a consumer, have some notion (which might be partly erroneous) of the "real value" of that tool, which means you assume a "real production cost" (including all costs up to the arrival of the thing at your place) of x, and you include some "assumed gain", and if that price seems acceptable (or even "advantageous") to you, and you want to have that product, you buy, at the price they are asking. Of course, there are many manufacturers where it becomes quite evident if they charge too much since in the papers, you'll read about their crazy profit last year (but even then, as a consumer, you do some little, spontaneous maths in order to see of how many deals those profits come from (e.g. you accept the profits of big food conglomerates since you rightly assume that on that piece of food you buy from them, they just "make" 1/2 cent, and you "allow" them that 1/2 cent - perhaps it's even 3 cent since they exploit their supplier, but you won't know that; on petrol/gas, it's different, but there you can't do anything about it - when crude oil was very expensive some time ago, petrol prices roared; they did not fall accordingly in the meanwhile, but the difference forms additional, undue profit for the oil conglomerates now).

There is a more or less direct relationship between value and price, since for products like tractors and screwdrivers, the market will proceed to some nivellation, and so in most cases, margin costs will make that no "regular" maker of some "regular" product will get an outrageous profit out of his sale to you. (We're not speaking of Porsche who are said to make 30,000 euro benefit on a 90,000 euro car (in Germany; abroad they sell for much less), we're not speaking of Hermès who sell their ladies' bags for some 8,000 euro (lizard being 40,000 or much more), we're not speaking of John Lobb shoes... and certainly not of iPad and all the overpriced Jobs stuff or other Rollers: here, you pay the regular price for the regular value, and then 50 p.c. on top in order to prove to third parties you own the means to have those products - and indeed, it's a very smart move to have been able to introduce such statusware even in the easily-attainable 800 euro price range, as Apple did, when in former times, status only could be bought by a minority (but even then, Hermès sold scarfs for some hundred of euro "only", of which many women made "collections", depending on their individual means)).

But again, those are statusware, whilst for regular products, you accept regular profit margins, and both users and makers accept those rules of the game, of some "10 p.c. for them, for their efforts".

Now all this direct relationship between product and acceptable price is doomed with sw, with novels, with copyright products, and you perfectly know that the bestseller in the bookstore which they sell you for 48 euro there, has some printing cost of 3 euro 50.

In ancient times, sw was sold in physical packages, and with often splendid manuals of sometimes thousands of pages, so at least in part, you were aware that the makers had spent some real money on you (margin costs for the package delivered to you).

Also, you were aware that sw development was man time, i.e. real cost, born by somebody, and those were the times both Word or Word Perfect were more than 800 Deutschmarks each, today's value at last 1,600 euro, perhaps 1,800.

Now back to MS - they PROVED TO ANYBODY that sw prices had NOTHING to do with any real cost on the side of the developer, and so today's users say, it's not my problem if the developer (individual or corporate, no matter) isn't smart enough to recoup his cost on a max number of users; I'm unwilling to enrich him unduly (with some exceptions in the professional area where it's more a "what does it offer to us, on top of what we would get with alternatives") - and as said, this "risk" is bigger when buying from Beijing, than from Utah.

In the end, the unwillingness of users to pay for sw, and to pay for content (where so much content is provided for free, or seemingly for free), has two sources: Total opacity of the profits the providers makes on the price he's asking from you, which triggers your fear you will be paying too much, and also your (real) lack of responsibility in the maker's success in finding a sufficient user base, by which then he would be correctly paid: You're not (morally or financially) responsible for topping up a "fair" price (i.e. a price you deem "fair" when the developer / copyright owner arrives at selling many copies of his "work") by 50, 100 or 300 p.c. for the only reason that that copyright holder isn't "smart" enough to sell in (adequate) numbers. (We ain't speaking of "select sw" here, i.e. a kind of sw where the developer could rise the price by giving you status - it seems that sub market is held by individual sw only. (Of course, it could be worthwile to muse a little bit about such an alternative, "999 installations worldwide" - but giving exclusive access to WHAT, to make such a scheme tempting for the buyer?)

Perhaps I overlooked additional factors, but one thing is for sure, it's again Gates (and the Oracle owner and what you can read about his riches) that makes people think, above any other factor, that sw developers take too much whenever they don't ask but for a real cheap price, so it's certainly a simplification to assume that people, for sw or for literary right, might think, "there's nothing tangible, there's no physical product, so I want it for nothing".

It's the perceived value, even of non-tangible products, and which is not presented in any plausible way to the consumer, and which thus is simply not there for the consumer.

All this in pre-conscious, not consciously "weighted" by the consumer, but he gets a "feeling" for the "right price", and since no developer except for MS/Oracle and such (and where you can see they charge far too much) communicates his "numbers", the consumer will never ever pay 1,800 euro for a thing like Word or Word Perfect anymore.

(As for Hollywood films and for bubble gum music, that's another phenomenon even: it's all for immediate consumption, it doesn't have any (perceived or real) "standing power" value - cf. people of "art house films" and "special music" who are much more willing to buy what they consume - and then, let's face it, the consumer will also tell himself, well, the "artist" will get all those chicks I won't get, and by that alone, he's "paid enough" (since I would do it for the chicks alone).)

Sorry, folks, but if you insist on just writing some lines on a subject, you'll leave out important things, very often, and just some months ago, the (German) Harvard Business Manager published some research on CEO papers ("Vorstandsvorlagen", "executive summaries"), being wanted "short", becoming so simplifying, so leaving out things the "bosses" might better had considered, that the quality of top M decisions in big corporations, during these last years, has greatly suffered: Really smart people, paid millions, take more and more stupid decisions, by lack of complete information, i.e. by lack of thorough thinking.

No further comment, as Kühn says.

HI there
I am a newbie in PDF processing issues.And i found a free trial which supports to annotate PDF files effectively.
http://www.rasteredge.com/how-to/csharp-imaging/pdf-annotating/
BUt it can not work with my windows8 set up.I want to know that if there is any program supports to do that
Thanks for any suggestions

Nana111 wrote:

HI there
I am a newbie in PDF processing issues.And i found a free trial which
supports to annotate PDF files effectively.
http://www.rasteredge.com/how-to/csharp-imaging/pdf-annotating/
BUt it can not work with my windows8 set up.I want to know that if there
is any program supports to do that

How about PDF-XChange Viewer or Editor (they're both free):

http://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-viewer

You'll find many of us in the forum are enthusiastic users of PDF-Xchange Viewer and derivatives. We've been using it for years as a substitute for Adobe Acrobat (the Pro version only costs ca. USD 40; Acrobat Pro costs ca. USD 250 - go figure, as our American cousins say).