One of my pet gripes has always been the sad inability to make notes in pdfs. This inadequacy annoys me on a daily basis when I print out a journal paper so that I can go through it thoroughly. Such a sad waste of paper for just doodling and highlighting! A few days ago, this daily anguish came to a peak. I was sorely missing my laptop, it was throwing a particularly nasty malfunctioning tantrum, and seeking comfort by looking up tablets. Given the seriousness of my laptop problems, I was given some consideration to buying a new tablet with the functionality for taking notes on documents. Unfortunately, I got a bit scared of the steep prices. The “decent” tablets available on Trademe didn’t seem so decent anymore when I found out that they were just entertainment boxes with the added feature of being a tablet. That didn’t sound like a machine that would be good for reading and taking notes. So, I moved onto the next best thing: ebook readers. While these snazzy gadgets combined the functionalities I desired: reading pdf documents and commenting on them, the price was enough to throw me off completely.
After these disappointments, I meandered into the realm of graphic tablets. These primitive relatives of the tablet PC had me going for a while, the Wacom Bamboo in particular, until I came to my senses and decided to check if they really could take notes on pdf documents. Turns out that the note-taking functionality of these funky digital pens is only good on Windows Vista. Given my allergy to that particular operating system, I decided to give them a miss too. Flustered from all that “research”, I took another step back and decided to check out the internet for free software that allow pdf editing. Unfortunately, Google mainly gave me hits for software that I would have to pay for. But, my tenacity paid off. After some gazillion searches, I found this blog. An enthusiastic installation followed this discovery accompanied by several whoops of joy. I had finally found something that was not only free but also incredibly good.
Below is a screenshot of some notes and highlights I took on an academic paper. The software also allows the user to draw various in the document as well as add sticky notes and text with or without a textbox. Most of the colours, fonts and other parameters are adjustable.
After some usage, I deem this software to be super-duper awesomeness. For all those who refuse to buy Acrobat based on the fact that they charge a hefty sum for a functionality that should really be free, PDF-Xchange viewer is the way to go. Download the application from here. Also note that a portable version of this software is available.
