Pdf Annotations in Preview

I am struggling to believe that it's not possible to search annotations inserted into a pdf with Apple's preview. The annotations (text box) are not found via spotlight nor via the search in Preview. Am I doing something wrong or is this a major shortcoming?

No one here can tell you what plans Apple have for anything. Even if they knew they would be excluded from saying by NDAs and so on.
Skim
http://skim-app.sourceforge.net
is more like the pdf reader you need.
Regards
TD

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Search PDF annotations in Preview?

How can you search your PDF annotations in Preview? There seem to be no options in the Search bar in Preview. I know you can browse highlighting and annotations via the Sidebar, but you can't search the annotations?
/edit: it seems that Adobe Reader can search these annotations - select Search (CmdShiftF), then check "Include Comments").
Can anyone enlighten me on the state of annotation search with Preview and confirm that it is missing?
Message was edited by: gko18

I will confirm that it seems to be missing - it does seem that the search bar on the right only searches the text of the PDF and not the annotations. Strange...
Thanks for the tip about Adobe Reader, I will have to check that out! One of the reasons I chose to use annotations was that I have a textbook that has been scanned as picture, not OCR, and I can't search in the text, so I figured the annotations would help me locate topics later. Hopefully I will be able to use Adobe Reader for this.

Printing PDF annotations in Preview

I'm not sure exactly where this question should go, but it is a printing problem...
I'm trying out Preview's annotation feature, and it's pretty nice, and looks great on the screen. But what if I want to print out the notes and annotations I've made? When I print, I see the little word-bubble marks, and highlighted text works fine -- but the comments themselves, which appear outside the margins onscreen, don't print. I also can't find any way to print them, even on a separate page.
Anybody know?

Hi Mike, I had the same problem, and it doesn't appear to be possible with Preview yet.
However, it was possible using Adobe Professional 8 (CS3), clicking on the "comments" button at bottom left in that app, brought up several options including printing comments. This doesn't even appear to be listed in their Help Viewer.
I don't have Adobe Reader so I can't say if this feature is included in that (free) app.
Good luck

Yosemite crippled PDF text annotation with Preview.

In previous versions of preview, you used to be able to select 'textbox' markup tool and one-click create textboxes wherever you want on a pdf. Now, with the new Yosemite, selecting 'text' markup tool creating a textbox in the middle of the screen, not where-ever you click. This cripples the productivity of annotating lecture slides during a lecture. I don't want my text box to always appear right in the middle of the page- I want to click to place it.
Also, why is it vertically center justified- who, EVER, used vertically center justified text rather than vertically top justified text?
Are there anyways around this?

The link below provides instructions for annotating a pdf in Yosemite Preview, and additional links at the bottom of this page provide instructions for several other pdf editing capabilities:
Select and copy text in a PDF
Fill out and sign PDF forms
Add, delete, or move pages in a PDF
Crop or rotate a PDF
Add effects to a PDF
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH20218?locale=en_US&viewlocale=en_US

How to I set an internal link in a PDF document using Preview? After setting a link under the Tools/Annotations menu, the link doesn't work and no detailed instructions are provided.

How to I set an internal link in a PDF document using Preview? After setting a link under the Tools/Annotations menu, the link doesn't work and no detailed instructions are provided via the Help menu other than it showing the pull-down menu selection to make.

No. I am able to use the other features such as underlining, highlighting, adding rectangles and oval and save those changes.

[SOLVED] Wanted: extract pdf annotations created in Mac OSX preview

I just had a collegue return a pdf marked up with "annotations".
I first struggled with finding a viewer that views the annotations, and those that could (evince, okular) all have more dependencies that I'd want/need.
I decided there must be an lighter weight way to extract the text of annotations from pdfs. I searched, read, and learned about pdf annotation formats and I figured out how to extract adobe annotations from a pdf. Only then did I realize that my collegue didn't use adobe. The annotations were created in Mac OSX's preview. Preview, it would seem, does not use the adobe xfpdf format for annotations, it uses some other means to embed the annotations.
I searched the pdf file in text and hex editors, but I couldn't find anything resembling what I knew to be in some of the annotations. However Preview does it, the text must be encoded and unreadable in the "raw" file. This is in contrast, it would seem, with adobe's annotations.
My question, then, is two-fold. First, are there any text-annotation extractor tools that can get notes created in OSX's preview? If not, does anyone know of any documentation outlining how Preview embeds this information? I've been googling the latter question, but I'll I'm getting is "where-to-click" level tutorials on how to DO annotations in Preview. I can't find any documentation of how that information is embeded into the file.
Note: evince does get the text of the annotations, but I'd prefer not to keep that installed. Evince-gtk is only every so slightly lighter on dependencies. Also, in evince I get flooded with "sticky notes" with all the annotation text. It would take a while to move those around and close them one at a time to be able to actually read them. I'm hoping to be able to extract all annotation text and dump it into a text file.
Last edited by Trilby (2012-05-29 00:38:32)

Holy crap, it works. A couple hours of reading ugly docs and 32 lines of code later, I have exactly what I was looking for.
I'd love it if some volunteers would try this out, beat it up, and see what breaks first so I can improve it. After a little polishing I might put it up in the AUR.
Get the code from my dropbox here
The Ugly Patchwork Makefile and a very brief TODO list are also posted.
I'll put together a PKGBUILD once this is in better order for distribution and installation. I just got the darn thing to work, it's time to celebrate, not code more.
Note to Mods: as in my "report", please move this thread to Community Contributions.
Last edited by Trilby (2012-05-29 00:34:38)

Annotating pdf documents in Preview - the text search feature doesn't work?

Hi everyone,
I'd like to annotate my pdf documents using preview. However, I realized the other day that as soon as I start annotating a document (with notes, shapes, highlighting, etc), the preview text search doesn't work anymore.
Thanks for any help or advice!

This is a known problem. I have seen one suggestion to print the annotated PDF as a new PDF in order to get search capability back. You can try the Apple Discussions "search" feature at the upper right corner to look for more suggestions.

Problems Editing Previous Annotations with Preview

Hi,
I was just wondering if anyone else has had a similar problem with Preview and/or has any advice on how to fix it.
Ever since upgrading to Mountain Lion, I've been having problems whenever I try to edit any of my text annotations in Preview. All of my notes for school are given as PDFs, so I have always used Preview and the textbox function to take notes during lecture. Before I upgraded, if I opened a previously-annotated document to study from and wanted to change something or add to the text, I would simply double-click the textbox and be able to fix it in 1 second.
Unfortunately, trying to make any changes to annotations has become a major process ever since switching to Mountain Lion.
Basically, as soon as I double-click any textbox to edit something I wrote at an earlier time, the box will shrink up to a single line that goes off the page and into oblivion. I have to resize the textbox over and over again just to fit it back on the page, which can be time-consuming and frustrating when paragraphs of text are suddenly condensed to one line that extends ten miles beyond the margins. It happens both with older documents from Lion and with the new documents I've only downloaded and annotated since upgrading to Mountain Lion. I thought maybe it was just my computer, but I tried it on a friend's Mac with Mountain Lion and had the same problem.
I have only used Preview for everything, so all of my annotations have been made using the same program. Also, it gives me no trouble if I try to edit as long as the document remains open; it only happens after I close out of a document and open it up again at a later time (even if it's immediately after closing it). Unfortunately, I can't keep 200+ documents open on the chance I might need to edit them at some point.
If anyone has any clue how I can stop this from happening in Preview or has a suggestion for another good PDF editor (aside from anything Adobe preferably), I would really appreciate it!!
Thank you very much in advance.

This is happening to me too! It's so frustrating especially since I've come to love Preview before upgrading to mountain lion. At first glace it seemed Preview had become more userfriendly with the textbox, line and circle drawers all separate icons now but the textboxes are such a pain. I know it only takes an extra 5 seconds or so, but by the time you add all the 5 seconds' up, it's heaps of time. It's especially hard if I'm listening to a lecture and I have to stop and fix my textboxes while the lecturer is still talking.
Sorry this isn't much of a solution, but I hope you don't feel alone dealing with this flaw!

Can you search annotations in Preview?

When annotating a pdf document using preview, is there a way to search your annotations?? Thanks!!

Thanks! I appreciate your response. I should have followed with a question about other options, but now that I've checked the Preview Help I see that that capability simply doesn't exist.

Can't view PDF annotations on my iPad... Desperate... please help!!

Hi guys,
The problem is when I edit/annotate my .pdf files on preview (adding text) and later try to open it on my iPad via Dropbox and regular Mail, it only shows me the original .pdf file minus all the edits I made on my MBP.
All I want to do is view the file WITH the edits I made on my computer on the iPad.
Is this a normal thing? Any particular apps that handle this?
Thanks in advance

I probably was unclear about an important point. It is the app/program that creates the annotation that controls format. So if you created an annotation on desktop and it is not in format that neu.annotate reads then it will not show up. BUT if you create annotation on neu.annotate it will show up on at least every variety of pdf reader I have tested (a lot, but all Windows or iPad based).
Simple illustration. On my Windows desktop and udsng Adobe 9.0, this am I took a pdf file and annotated it. I sent it to my iPad. The built in viewer did not show annotation, nor did neu.annotate. But I opened in pdf expert and it showed the annotation and the annotation was editable. THEN I took that very same annotated pdf file and *printed" it TO Adobe on my desktop and sent the printed version to iPad. That version displayed the annotation in built in viewer and in neu.annotate. This time the annotation was not editable.
I think the safest thing is to keep several pdf readers on iPad. And if you want to make sure that a recepient can view your annotation create it in neu.annotate (or notarize or iannotate when they get rotation bug fixed) or in a "printed" pdf (from desktop).
** I have no experience in Mac so I do not know if this translates to Mac

PDF annotator which doesn't "import" files

I'm a PhD. student and I have to study a lot of scientific articles, so I bought myself an iPad Air. I have been storing tens and hundreds of scientific articles on my Copy and Dropbox account, well categorized and organized in folders.
If I want to read and highlight or annotate a PDF on my Mac, it's easy; just open the PDF in Preview, highlight what I want and then save the changes, *without creating a copy* of the document.
But what if I want to do this on my iPad? Every app that I tried, when I opened the PDF that I had stored in Copy (say), it *imported* it into the app's library and if I made any modifications to it, the modified file didn't overwrite the original one, but instead saved a copy into the app's library that I could then open if there is a companion Mac app.
So: is there any iPad app to annotate PDFs and not create o copy of them that is edited? I would be really amazed and disappointed if not...
Thank you!

I've done a bit of research on this topic and found out that the app that I was looking for should be, in fact, a file browser, with Dropbox/Google Drive/other-cloud-based-storage sync and some PDF annotating tools. So I bought GoodReader 4 and I'm really happy with it, I can call it a close on this topic.
Thank you.

Highlighting PDF's in Preview

I have managed to find the button on which to do this, under the annotations toolbar, however when i press the button it does not highlight the document. I am a little confused as to why and what to do about this. Please help?

actually the PDF opened through Preview are able to highlight.
As far as I know, you need to open the PDF on Preview, click on the pencil icon (this way it will turn to blue), so every word you select will change its color to the one you select in the alias next to the pencil.
I wish I could help;

Printing problem with PDF graphs from preview

Whenever I print PDF files from preview or from safari, some graphs print incorrectly, although they are displayed correctly on the screen. This only happens with black and white figures and either a negative image with the black and white are reversed is printed or the background of the graphic just prints as a black box. Colour elements are unaffected. This doesn't happen when printing the same files using Adobe Reader or Adobe Professional. Any suggestions for tweaking this, or am I going to have to start using the Adobe plugins instead?

Please try it on Adobe Reader version 10.1.0 , Please note that this forum is for Adobe Reader on android and not for PDF Viewer.
-vaibhav

In Safari how do I open a .PDF file in Preview instead of Adobe Reader?

When a pdf file opens on my computer in Safari, it opens with Adobe Reader (v. 7.0.8). Until recently, I could right-click on my mouse and and a drop-down menu would appear with the option to open the pdf file in Preview instead of Adobe. That option has now disappeared from the drop-down menu. Can anyone explain how to get back the menu option to open the pdf file in Preview? Thanks. David
G4 Cube 1.8ghz/tiPowerbook 800 dvi/iMac (Intel) 20" Mac OS X (10.4.7)

My computer automatically open PDF inside the Safari
window, but I wish it would go back to opening it
externally via Adobe. (maybe we should trade
computers:-)
Anyway, we have the same question.
How do we control whether PDF launches internal to
Safari, or external in Adobe?
This is what I would like to as well. I often have a lot of pdf files I need to open and then save to my hard drive. When I click on a pdf file on a website Safari opens it and then I need to right click in the document to open it with Adobe. How can I get it to open in Adobe the first time without having to right click after it opens in Safari?
Thanks!

Viewing PDF Files in Preview

Since I upgraded to Leopard I am unable to properly view certain pdf files in Preview (Adobe also has some challenges). This is not a consistent problem. Certain pdf files open fine. My graphic designer just sent me a brochure that she created in CS Illustrator and I can see some of the graphical elements, but none of the text. After opening the file I also have to force quit Preview. I had called support a few weeks ago and they instructed me to reboot and reset my parameter rams. This sometimes helps, but shutting my computer down every time doesn't seem to be the best solution to the problem.

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
Preview supports only the open source PDF standard.
Adobe Acrobat Reader the latest version supports almost all PDF files, unless you don't install custom fonts that certain people sometimes add to their PDF.
They should be careful not to do that, as not everyone has the same font library.

Pdf Annotations in Preview

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