I was in training last week — rather than a printed text, we were provided with a PDF of the slides. PDF files are not the easiest thing to annotate without special software and, well, Adobe Acrobat isn’t precisely cheap.
I was very pleased to find Tracker Software’s PDF-XChange Editor. There is both a free and paid version of the software. For my purposes of adding notes to the slides, the free version is more than sufficient. It allows you to do the following (and much more!):
- Highlight
- Draw shapes and arrows
- Add “Post-it” notes
- Add text
- Add boxes
The class was held on Windows; the Editor works very nicely on Windows. I haven’t gotten it to work on Linux, but haven’t spent more than 5 minutes on it. The previous version, the PDF Exchange Viewer, works under Wine, with one caveat. It crashes if you attempt to save the first PDF file opened. So, “mount a scratch monkey” (open a small pdf file which you then ignore) and subsequent files can be opened and edited. The editing tools in the Viewer are not quite as nice as the Editor, however, they’re more than sufficient for marking up and annotating PDF’s.
