PDF is the standard of digital communication in business, education, and government organizations. It’s impossible to imagine a digital landscape without PDF. Corporations, universities, and government offices utilize PDF format in their activities regularly. That’s why busy executives, students, and government officials need to have a reliable toolkit to efficiently annotate PDF, edit, and collaborate on PDF documents.
What is PDF annotation?
Annotations are additional elements that can be added to the PDF document. Their goal is to clarify its content or add new information. Annotations are essentials of the PDF because it’s challenging to make the text clearer right away with custom editing, you will have to annotate PDF with additional information. PDF specifies the set of objects that can be added without changing the page content. These objects are called annotations and their purpose varies from marking up page content to implementing interactive features such as forms.
What PDF annotations are used for?
Annotations can be useful in various situations. Proofreading is one of them. Let’s imagine that you are preparing a draft of an important contract with a client and you don’t want others in your department to freely edit the contents of the draft.You can annotate PDF to make your life easier. Saving the draft as a PDF, they will be able to view the document but not edit. If they find information that needs to be changed, discussed, or entirely removed from the document, they would be able to mark the content that needs alteration and provide their reasoning in a comment next to the text. The best thing about this method is that the initial content will stay untouched.
You can also annotate PDF to improve the readability of the text and keep notes. Viewing an electronic document, you can take advantage of annotations to simplify your understanding of the content. An underline with a pop-up may provide the user with some additional information about a subject in case they do not have a full understanding. Links can be used to jump to different sections of the document where two sections reference one another. Arrows with a pop-up may be added over images or diagrams to provide details about different sections.
What types of annotations are there?
The PDF specifications define two categories for annotations. You can annotate PDF with markup annotations to mark up the information inside of the PDF file. Non – Markup annotations are used for other purposes; for example, for interactive forms or multimedia. Text markup annotations are simple and can be divided into several categories according to their usage. The most straightforward way to annotate PDF is to markup the text. It includes such functions as text highlight, underline. Two annotation types can be used to add notes to the page: text annotations in the form of the sticky note or in the form of the floating text box.
There are also annotations for drawing on the top of the page. They include square and circle annotations for drawing squares, rectangles, line annotations for drawing lines. The non–markup annotations allow users to add multimedia content to the page. Widget annotations are used to implement interactive forms, in particular, to add buttons, checkboxes, and combo boxes.
Lumin PDF – the easiest way to annotate PDF
Lumin PDF Lumin PDF is a tool that replaces inefficient paper processes with digital PDF ones. It works both on Windows and Mac, as well as on mobile devices. The software is easy and intuitive. It allows users to download, collaborate, annotate, edit PDF files in the cloud. You can connect Lumin to Google Drive and highlight, edit, sign PDF files directly in the cloud storage.
If you access Lumin by installing the Google Docs extension, you will automatically be given a Free account and 1 GB of storage. If you have a Free account, you will never be charged for using the Lumin service. You can upgrade to a premium account to access more storage space and features. Advanced functions include unlimited storage, unlimited document life, no advertisement, e-signature, premium email support.
Lumin PDF allows users to:
- annotate PDF files
- manipulate PDF pages
- sign PDF files
- collaborate on the PDF file online
Lumin PDF provides users with a powerful toolkit for annotating PDF files:
- add comments
- insert images, shapes
- highlight and underline text
With page manipulation function you can easily made necessary changes to PDF page:
- merge and rearrange PDF pages
- display files in the Grid mode
- rotate, delete, crop, insert blank pages in PDf file
Lumin’s seamless software makes the days when people needed to print or scan docs to be signed a distant memory. Using Lumin PDF, you can sign any document online. Plus, it makes handy recommendations for the best option of e-signature for your type of document. You can add signature by:
- Drawing digitally, the same way as you do on paper
- Inserting a ready-made signature
One of the greatest features that Lumin PDF gives you the opportunity to annotate PDF and share changes to the PDF file online. This feature works the same way as with Google Docs. Using Lumin PDF you can communicate with your team members directly in the document. Add a new answer, continue an existing discussion with the team, or illustrate changes that need to be made.
When your team is working on a large file with several authors, Lumin PDF keeps everyone synched in the PDF file itself.
Adding comments with Lumin PDF is simple. If you’re working in a large document or in a doc with many comments, you can quickly find and move through all comments by navigating to the Notes button, which will be to the left of the document. You can comment on anything in the PDF file. You can reply to or mention individual collaborators in the document using @ followed by that person’s name or e-mail address.
When several people comment on a file, the responses are saved in a sequence called Flow, located below the very first comment. The flow of responses and comments in Lumin PDF is the same as in Google Docs.
Another way to annotate PDF files is to write the text in free space or on top of the image using your finger or stylus. If you need to change the font, style, size, color or remove the annotation, click on the text field again to bring up the formatting menu. If you click on the text field, you can reposition the annotation in the file.
