I spent all night looking into PDF writing, ink-over-pdf, or whatever people want to call it. That's right: between the hours of 10pm and 6am, I dedicated all of my energies to downloading every program capable of PDF annotation and nearly had a nervous breakdown in the process. Loser? You be the judge.
Most of the solutions I've seen are clumsy. I only found one program that did the trick, and it wasof all thingsthe mindmapping project management powerhouse program
Curio.
First, here are the losers:
Inkbook is kind of nice, but the interface is sort of strange. I never got the hang of the interface: that huge page button is weird. I wouldn't use it.
Adobe Acrobat Pro will let you markup PDFs with the "pencil tool," but the tablet support is crabby. I couldn't get the eraser to work on my Wacom, there is no support for pressure control, and I'm not sure if you can change the color (I didn't stick around to find out). The pencil tool in acrobat is, in my eyes, for proofing onlynot note-taking and other tasks requiring handwriting.
Jarnal is a Microsoft Journal / OneNote look-alike written in Java. It gets the job done, but like other apps the pressure control seems non-existent. The interface is that shabby Java toolkit (bollocks), and the "mac-version" is packaged strangely (it is a test version afterall). If the Jarnal project ends up adding a swank Cocoa front-end for subsequent mac versions, I might end up using this. (o;
Evernote does not allow you to crete what they call "ink notes" in their Mac OS X offering, and they fail to mention this one their website or in their screencasts. At 4am, this was aggravating. Remember, kids, documentation can be the deal-breaker. Even still, Evernote doesn't seem to allow a person to write over a PDF. They could save a pdf as a "note" in itself, though. Useless, I'd say. :/ Beautiful application though.
Skim has no tablet support.
Formulate Pro is promising, but it definitely is "too raw," like Scott said. The project, also, has been inactive for a while. If anyone is looking for a pet project to fork, Formulate Pro would be the lucky loser.
I was not impressed by PDFPen or PDFClerk: their interfaces don't live up to the standard we're all used to by now. The only application that does is EverNote, and that doesn't even do what we want it to do.
The only program I found helpful in annotating PDF documents is Zengobi's Curio. Since Zengobi touts its program as a Notebook, WhiteBoard, Presentation and SketchPad monstrosity of a killer-application, I should have known it had what I needed. This video on "
PDF spread" illustrates how you can pull PDFs into CURIO and do creative things to them (including marking, highlighting, and presenting). I believe Curio does not allow for the searching and selection of text within a PDF, but I imagine this will change soon. Zengobi listens to its usersI think.
Hopefully someone read this whole post and got something out of it. I probably will never know.
Cheers,
Tim
