PDF documents - is there a good tool for remote collaboration: highlightings, annotations, comments, notes?

Posted by Paul Korm
Dec 15, 2013 at 10:08 PM

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.