[Scribus] Fw: a bit off-topic: Tool to add notes to PDFs??

[Craig Ringer]

John Jason Jordan wrote:
> On Sun, 13 Jan 2008 17:30:05 -0500
> "Mike Seifried" <mike.seifried at verizon.net> dijo:
> 
>> It appears that your can add comments to a document using Adobe reader if commenting is enabled in the document. See here. However, I don't see an option is Scribus to do generate a pdf file with this feature enabled.

I've been wondering about this myself. I have Acrobat Pro 8 here, so I
should create a few docs with annotations enabled and see what it does.
I wouldn't be too surprised to see some sort of PKI mechanism being used
 though.

Has anyone looked into this re enabling it for Scribus-generated PDFs?

> Yes, you can do so in Scribus, but perhaps not the way you are thinking of. Scribus (and OpenOffice) have the capability of exporting directly to PDF. If you create a document with editable fields (PDF fields in Scribus-speak) the user can fill in the fields. Editable fields include radio buttons, check boxes, text boxes and drop-down combo boxes. 

Text fields aren't much use for commenting and annotation because:

- They interfere with the real, printable document image

- They limit what you can say and where since they can't be added
anywhere by the reader

Additionally, as far as I know with Adobe Reader you can't save a PDF
with form fields filled. You can only print it out or, if the form is
designed for it, send the form data over the Internet to a preconfigured
server. That makes it rather hard to return the document with suggested
changes.

>  Plus, in the real world the reason for creating such a document is to send it to someone else, and everyone has Adobe Reader.

Annotations are part of the PDF standard. Annotations created by one
application can be displayed and worked with by another app that also
supports PDF annotations. Consequently, it should not matter which tool
you use to create the annotations, they should still be viewable in
Adobe Reader.

--
Craig Ringer