I vent my anger and frustration here.
I just recently got a tablet HP 2750p and I have to say that the PDF
on tablet sucks so bad. I mean, desktop/laptop annotation is even
worse.
All I was loking for was
a) the ability to HIGLIGHT easily using MULTIPLE color with ONE click
(good luck doing that in Adobe Acrobat, PDF Annotator is the model I
am looking at)
b) the ability to SELECT text and COPY them to clipboard. (not much to
ask right?)
So... I tried a few software already.
Adobe Acrobat
Foxit Reader Pro Pack
Bluebeam Revu
PDF Annotator
OneNote 2007 (yes, desperate enough to try even non PDF file format)
Let me start by saying, that I am not a fancy user. I am not picky.
All I ask are those two features. Nothing else really matters and
frankly, they are the two KEY features you would look for in a eBook
style usage of tablet or even ANY major reading annotation in eBooks
such as PDF.
Acrobat trumps in terms of stability but man.. the highlight sucks so
bad. In order to change color, I need to at least 3 clickso with
excessive movement. That is a BIG fail. higlight should never be that
hard to change color. One click, max. Hover to activate slideout
panel, click to select and high light away. PDF annotator totally did
that right in their full screen view. In addition, acrobat ABSOLUTELY
annoys me with the fact that if you highlight over something, it is
TOTALLY almost PAINFULLY hard to select those same text. To the level
that I have to enable HIGHLIGHT auto goes to comment in Pref in order
to just get those text out. Man... this can be extreme when you read
all your stuff in PDF. I mean... design philosophy... do these guys
atually use simple functions like highlighting?
PDF annotator is VERY good for highlighting and comment but ABSURDLY
missing the SIMPLEST feature to just SELECT and COPY text out. ABSURD,
I say. Why bother open PDF if you can't even copy any text out of
it??? That defeats the whole purpose of using PDF and OCR at all! This
would be THE de facto software of PDF marking if they can just provide
the basic basic basic feature of PDF text SELECTION and copy to
clipboard. Really, Adobe Reader can do taht even, why can't we have
that feature? You gotta be kidding me.
OneNote... love and hate. I know how powerful it is, but the fact,
that imported PDF is already in TEXT format but not SELECTABLE is
ABSURD as PDF Annotator. Like... wth is wrong with these people who
worked on these programs? COPY and PASTE text out of regular PDF
should be a STANDARD feature to anything that can OPEN PDF. My god, is
this message THAT hard to to get aross to the people who designed
this? PDF is not just a reading format, it is also a vessel to carry
text that CAN BE EXTRACTED! Or else, why don't we use JPEG? Jesus.
Revu is so hyped among users, I am sure it is very useful in CAD and
all that but hey, highlighting function is AS bad as Acrobat. Maybe
slightly better since it offers side menu option to allow easier
change but the screen realstate is BAD! I think Acrobat is starting an
TOTALLY bad trend by making even a highlight options SUCH cumbersome
to change on the fly. Try this for yourself. Use Acrobat Pro (not
reader) and highlight first sentence yellow and the next few sentences
red and then next sentence green. If you use marker, that can be done
in about... 5 sec? in acrobat? good luck having fun changing the tip
color... man...
Foxit Reader Pro is just as bad as Acrobat and Revu in that aspect...
Good luck clicking through about a few load of clicks just to change
highlight color.
So... This is why I wanna be a programmer. A program that is LIGHT
WEIGHT... and does VERY basic commenting and higlighting and nothing
more. Someone, please, code it up and make it open source. You will
have millions of people who hit this page trying easier ways to
highlight to thank your soul for it.
World sucks when simple things such as these don't even work well. Sigh.
