[OS X TeX] Comments in PDFs

[Jon Breitenbucher]

On Dec 22, 2004, at 10:35 AM, William F. Adams wrote:

> 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

I got the downloadable upgrade of Acrobat 7 Pro. I used it last night 
to put comments on some articles I am reviewing. From within Acrobat 
Pro one can "Send for Review" and you are given the option to allow the 
other reviewers to put comments on the PDF. If I understood things 
correctly, the other reviewers just need to have Adobe Reader 7 or 
Acrobat 6 to be able to put comments onto such a PDF. So as long as one 
author (the one who will create the comment enabled draft) has Acrobat 
7 the rest of the group just needs to have Adobe Reader 7. So far I 
like Acrobat 7 Pro. I even like the plug-in that was mentioned by Bruno 
(I think). The plug-in will allow you to see comments on the PDF and 
much more. I also enjoy Schubert's plug-in and it is still the default 
for Firefox, Mozilla, etc. as Adobe's plug-in only applies to Safari.
____________________________________________
Math illiteracy affects 7 out of every 5 Americans.

Jon Breitenbucher
The College of Wooster
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
308 E. University
Wooster, Ohio 44691

(330)263-2207
jbreitenbuch at wooster.edu
http://jbreitenbuch.wooster.edu/~jonb
http://ical.mac.com/kahless/Work

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