Faculty Directions, Spring 2006 - PDF Annotator: A Tool to Use with Tablet PCs

Cherylene Amidon
Applied Economics and Statistics

Experimental statistics faculty convert their course materials in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel to PDF and place the files in Blackboard or on their Web sites. Students often print those files and take notes on them during class. Recently, a student using a tablet PC in one of our courses wanted access to the original PowerPoint file so he could take notes directly on the electronic slides. Also, one of the experimental statistics faculty members who use a tablet PC was taking a course and wanted to "ink" directly on a PDF document.

While attending the Microsoft Roadmap Session earlier this semester, I asked one of the presenters about writing on PDF documents. He said that an annotator is available, and through a Google search, I found it.

The PDF Annotator allows a user to open PDF files in the annotator and write on the opened PDF document using the tablet PC pen. After "inking" on the document, the user can save the document as the original PDF file or do a "save as" to leave the original PDF file intact and create another PDF file that has the annotations. The newly annotated file will open in Adobe Reader (version 6 and 7) and in Adobe Acrobat.Blank pages can be inserted anywhere in the PDF document, and you can also append PDF files to the opened PDF document. In addition, the annotator can be used on your desktop or laptop with the use of a mouse.

The cost of the product is $49.95. To download a free 30-day trial version, go to http://www.ograhl.com/ld/indexgd.php.

 

Upon doing so, the following page appears.

 

This will bring up the File Download - Security Warning. Click on "Run," followed by "Run, Accept, Next, Next, Next, Install, Finish." It will prompt you to restart your computer. Once the application is installed and your computer has restarted, double click on the PDF annotator icon, open your PDF document in the annotator and start writing; it is that simple. Remember that your ink on the document can be saved back to the original file or saved to a new file.