Adding text annotation in Preview.app

marine_microbe,

Use View>Customize Toolbar to place the annotation tool on your toolbar.

Matt

I put the annotate tool on my toolbar. I want the words on the document like it was in earlier versions and how the Preview Help states:
Choose Note from the Annotate pop-up menu in the toolbar.
Drag over the area where you want the text to appear.
Enter your text.
But all I get are little yellow icons on the page and notes in the margin.

It's like someone deleted the Text Annotation feature.

Yes Preview is really messed up. I can't find anyway to print a copy of my pdf WITH annotations showing up. And the bookmark implementation is absolutely nuts.

In Acrobat you can bookmark pages in a document so that you can later
easily find your way around a very large document. In Preview, it
appears that they have added this feature but it works very
differently. The bookmarks are more akin to bookmarks in Safari.
They exist outside of the pdf and they stay in your bookmarks menu
even when another document is open. This is. . . really odd. As yet
I have not found a way to tell Preview to just show me the bookmarks
for the open document. After you have added 10 or 20 bookmarks to 2
or more documents, the bookmarks menu quickly becomes useless. Also,
b/c the bookmarks are not stored inside the .pdf, they do not transfer
to Acrobat if you mail the document to someone else.

Whoever worked on this project did not see to know much about .pdf documents or how they are used in the real world.

Agreed, notes in Preview is screwed up. It's difficult to select a previously created note and move it, or delete it. And I can't for the life of me figure out how to print the notes and not just the little yellow icon.

Jennifer

Totally agree with Marine_Microbe, one of the best features of Preview under Tiger was the ability to "fill in" pdf forms by dragging boxes to size and filling in the text...easy! This new feature of adding mini post-its just does not do the job as well, plus, when you send the pdf to other people, they cannot read the notes anyway; what's the point of that?!

If anyone knows how to get that feature back, please post it asap!!

I am having the same issues. It is driving me crazy. Can anyone help?

The sticky note/text annoatation feature was very useful as it was saved with the PDF and appeared for other users and apps (like Acrobat).

I might try and locate a copy of the Tiger version of Preview and see if it will run under Leopard - until the feature is restored to Leopard Preview...

Strange there is no Feedback link for Preview but maybe the OS X feedback will get through?
http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Update - the Tiger version of Preview.app will not run in Leopard!

Like everybody else in this post, I just discovered that I cannot add text annotations to PDFs. This feature was extremely useful for my work. I hope somebody finds a hack to restore this function!

Try this thread..

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6009893&#6009893

While that thread is useful, it does not address the main concern of this thread. The ability to add text annotations within the body of the document is gone.

I need text annotations that print out and can be viewed by non-Mac users. For example, I need to add editing annotations to draft brochures that I receive as PDF files. With the latest Preview I can add coloured circles but not text.

You can add text as notes which appear floating on the side (not ideal IMHO) but you can do it.

They most definitely do cross-over from Mac to Windows because I tested them. Maybe it depends on your version of Acrobat Reader (I was using v8) or whether they have the view notes option turned on ?

Cheers

Let's be clear of the problem here:

Everybody knows how to annotate in preview through either the menu or with a keyboard shortcut. However, preview in OS X Leopard is different than it was in Tiger.

In Tiger, when you annotated, a text box would appear on the margin of the document. Then, when you went to print it off, your printed document could contain your annotations. This is good if you're using, say, an online textbook in school.

In Leopard, however, your annotations appear in the margins, and are missing on a printed copy of the text. We want them to appear on the printed copy.

I've been recommended Skim as an alternative by a colleague. Haven't used it yet, but he says it's excellent.

http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/index.html

Edited by: Triskaideka - typo

Skim looks useful as a PDF utility but the Help page states
"The notes are not saved in the PDF data itself, therefore other PDF viewers will probably not be able to show the notes."

so it will probably not fix the main problem we are trying to solve. I wil try it out anyway.