I read quite a lot of documents in various formats (ps,pdf,djvu,..) but have a problem to deal with them in consistent way. I'd like to be able to annotate and bookmark. For djvu, there is WinDjview, bookmark works but not annotation. For pdf, FoxitReader allows annotation, but no bookmarks. Today I tried GoBinder which seems to import the files as pictures and index them. I found this very nice, cause I could very easily annotate inside, ... but the program is sooo slow and search not working very well.

Would be glad to hear any suggestions? How to read/annotate/bookmark various document formats efficiently? Thank you

I just convert everything to PDF and then annotate using Acrobat Professional's tools. Acrobat offers a slew of various annotation types as well as graphical tags, it understands PDF+text documents (with embedded OCR information), the highlight tool understands multiple columns (so when you try to highlight text in just one column it doesn't spill over to the other column), and PDF is well-supported everywhere. The downside is the price, but it's worth it for me, particularly because I also use its OCR engine.

-- Chris


quant wrote:

I read quite a lot of documents in various formats (ps,pdf,djvu,..) but have a problem
to deal with them in consistent way. I'd like to be able to annotate and bookmark. For
djvu, there is WinDjview, bookmark works but not annotation. For pdf, FoxitReader
allows annotation, but no bookmarks. Today I tried GoBinder which seems to import the
files as pictures and index them. I found this very nice, cause I could very easily
annotate inside, ... but the program is sooo slow and search not working very
well.

Would be glad to hear any suggestions? How to read/annotate/bookmark
various document formats efficiently? Thank you

I use Acrobat Pro too - but only when it's too much trouble to convert to html. If I hadn't paid for the license, I'd probably switch to FoxitReader and possibly PDF would be a breeze then. As it is, no doubt due to the hog of an application Acrobat, I don't like PDF. Too slow, the scrollbar sticks. I prefer using Net Snippets or NVU to convert to html and then annotating via the excellent Firefox extension Scrapbook. It offers highlighting, notes, full-text search. And it's open source.

But, quant, you want to stick with the original document formats?

Two ways in which I bookmark and annotate (or at least note): I use Powermarks for creating bookmarks with short notes for both local and online files. A great application.

And I've recently started adding local file links to Zoot, grouping them into projects, making longer notes about them there.

I have a vague memory of trying GoBinder. Didn't like it - seemed unstable. Then tried OneNote - which has a similar pastel colour scheme and is fine if you're happy with binder metaphors. Send to OneNote's PDF printer and add notes to the PDF inside OneNote. Perhaps this is your best solution?

Isn't UltraRecall good for this?

Ike

But, quant, you want
to stick with the original document formats?

preferably, yes. It's ok to convert ps to pdf. But scanned documents are much smaller and faster in djvu than pdf, and I found Acrobat quite poor in OCRing compared to djvu files that are already OCRed. On several occasions I was looking for certain phrase which I knew was in the file, but didn't find it. Copying and pasting part of the page revealed that the text was very poorly OCRed by Adobe. Also another thing I like on Foxit Reader and Windjvu, is that search finds all occurrences of search term at once, which is very convenient to quickly find what you look for.

But seems that converting everything to pdf could be a way to go. Maybe I'd go for this option were FoxitReader able to create bookmarks. The price of Adobe Acrobat is way over the amount I can afford.

At the moment, when I want to note sth, I create a link to file in UltraRecall, take a screenshot of that part of the page and note a page number. I don't know if this is the best strategy, so wanted to know how people deal with this kind of problem, and was hoping that there might be some soft that reads various formats (there are many search programs that index the file so it should be able to find the text inside and note its location), and places text and annotation over it, in its own format as another layer by saving x,y coordinates of the annotation.

I used Filenotes to manage a variety of file formats, add notes to them: http://www.filenotes.com/fno_iicle_review . Overkill for my purposes, but others may find it useful.

Ike

quant wrote:

But seems that converting everything
to pdf could be a way to go. Maybe I'd go for this option were >FoxitReader able to create
bookmarks. The price of Adobe Acrobat is way over the amount I can >afford.

Just wondering, looking over the Feature Set for Foxit Reader Pro Pak:

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

it speaks of Annotations, and hints at multiple notes per file - the Feature Set looks pretty impressive and the price of the Form Designer doesn't look bad.

Anybody had any experience in these areas of the program?

I am no fan of Adobe, but I tried an evaluation version of Foxit for annotating PDF files, and I thought it had a lot to be desired if that was the primary purpose for using it. And, it did not install/uninstall well from my machine. It kept making itself the default program for PDF's regardless of how many times I reset my machine. We, my IT administrator and I, even edited the registry to stop this behavior, and it still persisted. Granted, its possible that this problem was caused by something else, but it just did not deliver. I ended up with Acrobat Standard. Its slow and bluky, but for me, its still better at annotating than FoxitPro. YMMV.

--Ken

Just an update ...

I found excellent (IMHO) pdf annotating/conversion tool, Bluebeam PDF revu, standard price is $149, but for students, they offer it for $30 (no proof needed)

http://www.cadopolis.com/store/addons/Bluebeam-PDF-Revu---Standard-Student-Edition-P429C1.aspx

Features I like so far:
- tabbed environment (new documents open as tabs, which allows fast navigation)
- freehand and many other comment/annotation tools, I can navigate though all my annotations fast
- can add/edit bookmarks
- search for terms through the whole documents at once, very fast navigation through search results
- conversion to/from pdf for many format

More info:
http://www.bluebeam.com/web07/us/products/revu/standard/features.asp

For $30, I think it's a steal ... I bought it after 15 minutes of evaluating it ;-)