You’re in luck if you’re using Preview on your Mac system: it has quite a rich set of features for annotating or reviewing PDF documents and quite a few other neat tricks up its sleeve that make it quite capable in the PDF world. No need to download or purchase any software from Adobe or a different third party so you can send clear feedback to your attorney!
I’ll demonstrate with a PDF document I’ve been working on – proof PDFs for my newest book, the 10th anniversary edition of the best-selling Wicked Cool Shell Scripts. As with your contracts, it’s just a big document and my feedback needs to be tied to a specific point – or word – on a page, which is far easier to do in the document rather than in a separate email or note.
First thing to realize is that all your annotations are going to change the document itself, so a good practice is to make a copy of the original and add your reviewing comments and tweaks to the new version of the document.
Open up this new ready-to-be-reviewed copy of the PDF in Preview and it’ll look like this:
From the very top you can see that this is page 1 of 40. The toolbar along the top is full of useful features, the first of which is accessible from the leftmost button: thumbnails. Actually, maybe “sidebar” would be a better word, as you can see from the options on the menu:
I really like Thumbnails because then it’s easy to get a sense of the context of a page in the document, and use Continuous Scroll for usability (though you might prefer Two Pages if you have a big monitor). With those selected, here’s what it now looks like in Preview:
Let’s go back to that toolbar, however, as there’s a lot more that’s useful. You can zoom “in” or “out” with the “+” and “-” keys, which is great for overcoming the proverbial small print of a contract you’re reviewing. You can share the PDF via email and Messages (among others) with the share button, then on the right side are a highlight annotation (select it and you can click-and-drag to highlight words or phrases “on” the document, and you can even choose your highlight color, as shown below), a rotation feature if it’s all incorrectly oriented and, the most important, the toolbox icon.
Of course, there’s a search feature and one great benefit of PDF is that you can search for words, phrase etc just like any other document.
But let’s go back to the toolbox icon and click on it. BOOM! Lots of cool features show up:
The two that I use most often are the ability to include a signature [which you scan into the computer: How to add a signature to Mac Preview] and the “Note” feature, the sixth and seventh buttons from the left. To add a note, click to place the cursor in the appropriate spot (or click and drag to select the relevant word or phrase), then click Note. A window pops up and you can type in as much as you’d like:
Done? Click anywhere else on the screen and the note vanishes, just leaving behind a little square to indicate its presence:
Note also that I’ve used the highlight feature to mark “mobile technology” in the document.
Turns out that those really cover the vast majority of most people’s needs with annotating or reviewing PDF docs, but there’s more that Apple PDF Preview can do, as suggested in the Tools menu:
Hope that helps you become a power user of Preview and get those contracts reviewed quickly and easily!
The post Reviewing PDF documents with Mac Preview? appeared first on Ask Dave Taylor.