[OS X TeX] Comments in PDFs

[William F. Adams]

On Dec 22, 2004, at 4:55 AM, Mark Smith wrote:

> Do we have a LaTeX tool which can enable users of e.g. AdobeReader 7 
> to add comments to PDF files ?
>
> AFAICS, this "comments enabled flag" can only be set for PDFs 
> generated by Acrobat and only by the originial author. I'd like to be 
> able to set this flag with e.g. pdflatex, if there is a tool, package 
> or command which enables this.
>
> These "comments" would be a nice mechanism for enabling non-TeX savvy 
> reviewers to comment on draft articles, since most non-TeX savvy 
> colleagues that I deal with will be using AdobeReader for PDFs anyway.

Before Adobe Acrobat 7 was announced this could only be done by the 
``Adobe Reader Server Extensions'' which cost sixty-two _thousand_ five 
hundred US dollars for a license which would allow one to enable _10_ 
.pdfs for use in an unlimited number of copies by an unlimited number 
of people.

It's important to note that originally Adobe sold the Adobe Acrobat 
Reader program (IBM was one of the few licensees --- they bought it and 
included it on a CD-ROM w/ all their product information for their 
sales force.

When that fell through they tried to get people to purchase Adobe 
Acrobat Approval (the IRS was one of the few groups which licensed that 
--- used to be you could get a copy from them on CD-ROM w/ certain 
small-business forms).

Adobe has finally arrived at the pricing model which I've always 
thought they should've had in the first place (free viewer/reader, 
moderately expensive authoring tools). While it's probably possible to 
bypass the encryption / security which enables the annotation feature, 
that's not a thing which ought to be done or even considered to my 
mind.

If you want this feature, buy Adobe Acrobat 7 and run it in an emulator 
penalty box if you must, but we running Mac OS X are fortunate to be 
using the Unix which is best supported by Adobe and can buy / use this 
directly.

William

-- 
William Adams, publishing specialist
voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708
www.atlis.com

--------------------- Info ---------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
           & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Post: <mailto:MacOSX-TeX at email.esm.psu.edu>