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PDF documents - is there a good tool for remote collaboration: highlightings, annotations, comments, notes?
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Posted by sciagent
Dec 17, 2013 at 02:02 PM
“could there” -> “could not find there” - an example of how such distraction as an incoming call may affect :)
Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 17, 2013 at 03:02 PM
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.
Posted by sciagent
Dec 17, 2013 at 11:52 PM
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…
Posted by 22111
Dec 21, 2013 at 03:09 PM
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.
Posted by 22111
Dec 22, 2013 at 02:29 PM
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 ?