Dictate Note Annotations
The voice dictation feature in Mountain Lion opens up the possibility of quickly adding note annotations to a PDF. To add a text note annotation to a PDF opened in Preview.app, use the Tools menu > Annotate > Note command. Use the voice dictation feature (shortcut fn fn) in 10.8 to dictate the note. Continue adding note annotations to the PDF, and use File > Save a Version (CMD S) to embed the notes into the original PDF. Export PDF Annotations with PDFoo Next, open the PDF in PDFoo, assign a prefix, and export the PDF annotations to a text file. Each note will be followed by a pdfoo:// URL which links back to the original PDF. Follow the link to lookup the context for your note. Save your exported notes in Evernote/Scrivener/DEVONthink for easy search and retrieval, or share it with your colleagues via email or the web. Like to Dictate? Get Dragon Dictate OS X 10.8's inbuilt voice dictation feature has a few shortcomings currently: it has to connect to Apple servers for processing which introduces a noticeable lag, it doesn't quite work well with accents, and it requires keyboard intervention to switch it on and off repeatedly. For users who find the dictation feature useful, Dragon Dictate for Mac v2.5 (currently $80 on amazon) is a worthwhile upgrade which addresses the above limitations.
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Why export PDF annotations?
Do you read and refer to important PDF documents at work? Do you make notes and annotations using tools like Preview.app on Mac OS X and iAnnotate or GoodReader on iPad? Are your insightful notes locked away in the PDF? Would you like to make your notes accessible and easily searchable? PDFoo enables you to export notes and comments from these PDFs into text to share easily with your colleagues, or to index and search inside your favorite note-taking application. PDF annotations are largely useless without context however. Using PDFoo app, you can easily attach pdfoo:// URLs to each text annotation, and the context for each note is just a click away. Workflow Guide PDFoo can export notes and highlight annotations from your PDF to a text file (RTF format). Further, it inserts pdfoo:// URLs to link back to the location for each note in the original PDF. Simply follow the pdfoo URL to open up the PDF and view the context for the annotation. The workflow is as follows:
More about PDFoo Watch the PDFoo Quick Guide video, or skim the PDFoo overview document, or download and try out "PDFoo Lite", and purchase the unrestricted version of PDFoo on the Mac App Store. PDFoo enables linking into PDF content. The concept has a simple analogy: to link to web pages we use http:// URLs. Similarly, to link to PDFs we can use pdfoo:// URLs. These PDFs reside on your computer, and PDFoo resolves the URL to figure out which PDF to open. For example, PDFoo is wired to respond to pdfoo://apphelp/ URL to open the PDFoo help document. Creating PDFoo URLs is easy: First, open the PDF. Second, assign a prefix such as "motion5man" for 1500-page Motion 5 PDF Manual. Third, drag out links to sections inside the PDF, or copy out specific paragraphs with links back to source, or even export annotations with links back to the original PDF.
This 2 min video shows how the AutoTOC feature works by interpreting the fonts used in the PDF document. AutoTOC makes it easy to automatically generate a table of contents (TOC) for your PDF, and its easy to experiment. AutoTOC in action on the 140-page PDF manual for Curio 7 available from www.zengobi.com Features powerful new tools to edit and build a table of contents for your PDF. An iPad is great for reading PDFs. Use a Table of Contents (TOC) to navigate a PDF easily inside your favorite PDF reading app. The slides below show how to locate the TOC in iBooks and GoodReader apps for the iPad. PDFOutliner makes it easy to embed a TOC in your PDFs. The PDF shown is Final Cut Pro X Unleashed, an excellent PDF ebook published by Digital Heaven. |
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