ipads and pdf commenting?

[eppack]

New here and did some searching and did not find anything relevant, so apologies if this has been addressed.

I work for a local government and some of our Board members want us to get them ipads for their meeting agendas. We post a large number of PDF files online for them as well as the public, and of course we don't want to have to print them unless it's absolutely necessary. The problem is that several of the members WANT the paper because they can then take it along wherever they go and add little notes or highlight passages, etc. As a result, they have been resistant to allowing us to go fully paperless which would be a huge savings of tax dollars for everyone, because they believe they would have to give up that ease of commenting.

However, some of them are now telling us that if they had an ipad, they could write directly on the screen and make all their little notes, circle stuff, underline, and so on, but I have absolutely no knowledge to know if this is even true. My understanding of this functionality is that you would mark up the document, then save it (with the annotations and comments) on the device, assuming the source document is online and read only, as ours are. You could then reopen it in the device as needed to view the doc AND the notes any time you like. Is this basically correct? (I should note I do have a smartphone and understand the concept just fine)

If so, does this mean that they would probably/possibly need to use a stylus when they do this? I have fat fingers so can't visualize finely detailed work on ANY device without a stylus Is this a native function or would there need to be some additional software installed to do this? If so, how is this different from Acrobat Reader which has this functionality built in IF the original document was enabled for commenting at create time? I am ass-u-ming that there is a version of Acrobat Reader for the iPad

Please understand this is not a question about "Why an iPad", but rather, "Will an iPad do what we want it to do", which is facilitate commenting on online documents.

TIA

elaine
charlottesville, va

 

[Tim SPRACKLEN]

Thanks for your comprehensive description of your problem.

Absolutely what you want to do is possible and there are several - many - apps out there that will do this.

Have a look in the App Store at iAnnotate. It's by far, in my view, the most comprehensive app for this type of application. If you go to the Developer's web site you can download their detailed user manual for free so you'll be able to check out for sure that it will do what you want.

A slightly less sophisticated app is GoodReader, the iPad's 'Swiss Army Knife', which also has PDF markup as well as many other features. It's cheaper than iAnnotate but is consistently rated the number one must-have app by iPad Forum members.

Anyway, have a look at the iAnnotate User Manual and see if it meets your need. I'm sure you'll get lots of other suggestions too, but don't hesitate to come back with any clarification you might require. We're all enthusiasts here and love talking about the iPad.

Tim
Scotland

 

[sjleworthy]

i've been researching this type of thing - in my job i too like to quickly sketch, make notes, scribble ideas etc etc.

i've found some good apps that you can do this with, but none so far that have effective O.C.R. capabilities (in fact, no OCR capabilities). This would be awesomeness, but so far it's disappointing there nowt out there i can find

 

[DontUnderstandMyIpad]

i've been researching this type of thing - in my job i too like to quickly sketch, make notes, scribble ideas etc etc.

i've found some good apps that you can do this with, but none so far that have effective O.C.R. capabilities (in fact, no OCR capabilities). This would be awesomeness, but so far it's disappointing there nowt out there i can find

You could use a separate OCR app and then copy the result. OCRtoolpro might do the job, however so far there seems to be no OCR iPad app, which utilizes the camera, so you might be better off using an iPhone app.

 

[sjleworthy]

You could use a separate OCR app and then copy the result. OCRtoolpro might do the job, however so far there seems to be no OCR iPad app, which utilizes the camera, so you might be better off using an iPhone app.

unfortunately that app only recognises photos or scans of text, no handwriting.

 

[zipur]

is there a drag and drop app option out there. I have 8g of PDF. work manuals I would like on my Ipad.

 

[DontUnderstandMyIpad]

is there a drag and drop app option out there. I have 8g of PDF. work manuals I would like on my Ipad.

Try Goodreader.


1) Set up goodreader as a network drive (this will make the goodreader folder appear as a hard drive on your computer).

On Windows 7, this can be done as followed. (Follow the instructions, but instead of browsing to the folder, add the IP address Goodreader shows when you open Wifi-Transfer)
www.itechtalk.com/thread3673.html
On Mac, instructions can be found here:
www.goodreader.net/gr-man-tr-wifi-mac.html

At this stage the goodreader network drive can be used pretty much as a thumb drive, so you can copy/cut/move folders/files.

Now whenever you want to transfer files/folders, you only need to open Goodreader and start the Wifi Transfer (start it by pressing the wifi symbol at the bottom).

 

[Mackey]

Hi guys

I have an additional question to this discussion.
I read pdf's in connection with my study and use iAnnotate to annotate in the pdf's... But iAnnotate does not always recognise the text and therefore no annotations.

As far as I've read, it is because of OCR.
So what I need, is an app that can make iAnnotate recognise the text in an entire PDF document.
The question is, does this app exist?

 

[kriskiter]

our solution at work

Boxwave stylus is great for this

GoodReader for file/folder organizing with DropBox connectivity to store or send large files. good for basic annotation.

PDF Expert ***** to do our annotation. Our sales force prefers it over iAnnotate. PDF Expert is very intutive and after annotation it is easy to open in Goodreader to preserve the changes. It can do fillable PDF forms as well as email (or store in GoodReader) flattened copies.

We used to use iAnnotate but PDF Expert was much better recieved.

 

[Mackey]

But if the text is not recognised, can PDF expert still highlight?
That's the problem with iAnnotate - when it recognises text it works perfect, but when it doesn't there is no highlight..

 

[kriskiter]

if the file is not OCR capable you will not be able to use the select, highlight feature.

however in PDF expert, what i do is choose the pen, pick the highlight color, choose thinkness, then select a low opacity (this all goes pretty quicly). now your old school kicken it Accent Highlighter style