Add, view, and exchange comments: Tutorial

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Tutorials

Add, view, and exchange comments

If you often create documents collaboratively within a workgroup, you can simplify and expedite your document review cycles with Adobe® Acrobat® 5.0. Instead of attaching sticky notes to review a paper document, you can add electronic comments to a document saved to Adobe PDF. Unlike sticky notes that can get lost, electronic comments stay put and can be sorted by type, page, author, and date, without altering the original file. In the steps that follow, you'll learn how to add comments to an Adobe PDF document and consolidate comments from multiple reviewers.

1. Add a note to an Adobe PDF document.
Open an Adobe PDF document that you want to review. Select the Note tool on the toolbar, and click anywhere inside the document window. Type in text for the note. To resize the note pop-up window, drag its lower right corner. To close the window, click its upper left corner. To reopen the window, double-click the note icon. Click the Hand tool when you are done using the Note tool. Acrobat makes it easy for you to edit notes and other comments. To move a note, drag its icon to a new location in the document window. To reset the location of the associated note pop-up window, right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Mac OS) the note icon, and choose Reset Note Window Location from the pop-up menu.

2. Highlight text and associate a note with it.
Select the Highlight tool on the toolbar, and drag to highlight text in the document. Position the pointer over the highlighted text, so that it changes to an arrow. Double-click the highlighted text, so that an associated note pop-up window appears, containing the text you highlighted. Type to enter additional text for the note. Other types of comments you can add to an Adobe PDF document include free text, sound, stamps, attached files, additional text markups such as strikeouts, and graphic markups such as squares. You can even spell check comments to make sure that they're free of typos. For more information about review and commenting tools available in Acrobat 5.0, refer to the Acrobat 5.0 online Help.

3. Export comments to an Acrobat FDF file.
To return your comments to the document author, you can send them by e-mail in the original Adobe PDF document or export them to an Acrobat Forms Data Format (FDF) file. An Acrobat FDF file only contains the comments, so it's smaller in size and, therefore, more efficient. Choose File > Export > Comments. Enter a filename, select a location for the file, and click Save.

4. Import comments from an Acrobat FDF file.
To gather comments from multiple reviewers, the document author can import multiple Acrobat FDF files into a single, consolidated Adobe PDF document. When imported, the comments are placed in the exact locations as they appeared in the original document. Choose File > Import > Comments. Select the Acrobat FDF file you want to import, and click Select (Windows) or Open (Mac OS).

5. View and sort comments in a list.
Choose Window > Comments or click the Comments tab to display the Comments palette. The Comments palette lists all the comments added to the document. By default, the comments are sorted by page. To sort the comments by author, click the arrow in the upper right corner of the Comments palette to display the Comments palette menu, and choose Sort By: Author. Click the symbol to the left of an author name to display the author's comments. Here you've learned how to add, view, and exchange comments in a document review cycle. Explore Acrobat further to find out how to generate comment summaries, share comments in an online Adobe PDF document, and more. For more information, see other Web tutorials or "Adding Comments" in the Acrobat 5.0 online Help.