A Reader that annotates and more?

rvdparis · 12-10-03, 10:01 AM

Hello all,

Just wondering if anyone knows about an app that reads pdf, or lit, or rtf and lets you make annotations AND collect them (for export to another program). I am a researcher that needs to download articles and books to my Axim, and then highlight and make notes, and then export my notes to a text analysis program.

Ubook (http://www.gowerpoint.com) is probably the best program I have found that makes an attempt to do this. (It by far is the best reader out there, in my opinion). Yet, sadly, it won't read .pdf files and there is no easy export of annotations that you have made (aside from cut and paste).

Adobe Acrobat for the PDA loses all its annotation capability that the full program has.

Microsoft Reader has highlighting and annotating abilities, but I cannot find anywhere how to retrieve and export a collection of those notes.

Thanks for your help!

Rich
_______
Axim 5, 300 Mhz, 32 MB
128 MB SD, 128 & 256 CF
French ROM, OS

brianfoley · 12-14-03, 06:04 PM

Nothing that I know of.

Are you reading off heinonline by any chance?

Brian

rvdparis · 12-14-03, 07:05 PM

I am not sure what Heinonline is...

-Rich

brianfoley · 12-15-03, 04:37 AM

Its a PDF based legal database that I use quite a bit. I just thought that you may have been using it.

:)

rvdparis · 12-16-03, 07:22 AM

I don't use that, but most of my journal articles are in PDF format. Don't you think it would be great if you could annotate PDF files in Acrobat Reader for PDA???

It seems like a logical step to make for PDA software developers - I mean, when I read, I make lots of notes in my books and then I refer to them later. Don't you?

Anyway, I suppose one COULD convert the PDF to an RTF or HTML and read it in Ubook ...where you can annotate. But that seems like so much work. Especially when you have so much reading!

Take care!

Rich

brianfoley · 12-16-03, 08:28 AM

If only! The heinonline PDFs are image based making conversion impossible. I have to continuously switch between Adobe and Word.

The greatest invention ever would be a "floating" annotation box that could be converted into a stand alone word document when needs be.

Chances of that happening?

:)

rvdparis · 12-16-03, 09:37 AM

There is software like that for the PC - we use programs called Computer Aided Qualitative Analysis - like Atlas.ti. "Coding" software - to analyze texts, interviews, etc for common codes or categories. It doesn't exist for PocketPC.

For you PDF images...you could use Adobe Acrobat's Capture function or use OmniPage's scan pdf function to OCR your documents and then convert them to a searchable PDF or .doc.

I've done it before, and it can be time consuming...so I am careful to pick documents that are really important to me.

take care
rich