Using Acrobat to mark up pdf proofs

Increasingly publishers are sending out proofs as Adobe Acrobat pdf files via email. The usual way of dealing with these is to print them out and mark up the hard copy. Over the last 12 months or so, I have tried marking the electronic copy using the ‘comment' tools in the full version of Acrobat 5 (the tools aren't available in the free Acrobat Reader).

My main clients are educational publishers and not-for-profit organisations working in close association with the Department for Education and Skills. Marking up proofs electronically is a new way of working for all of us. No doubt other publishers are further advanced in using Acrobat in this way; however, the lessons we learned may prove useful to others.

First a quick history lesson on the different versions of Acrobat. Acrobat 4 saw the development of the humble electronic sticky note of earlier versions into a basic set of tools for annotating and marking up pdf files. These ‘annotation' tools were refined into the ‘comment' tools of Acrobat 5. In Acrobat 6 (which came out at the time of writing) the comment tools have undergone a further stage of evolution; to mark up files in the ways suggested in this article you will need at least Acrobat Standard (the tools are also available in the top-of-the-range Acrobat Professional).

This article focuses on Acrobat 5. The tools work slightly differently in Acrobat 4 and Acrobat 6; endnotes describe the differences.[1]

The comment and markup tools

When you open a pdf file in Acrobat, at the top of the screen is the toolbar.[2] Three sets of button tools are useful in marking up pdf proofs: ‘comment' tools (the default icon looks like a sticky note), ‘graphic markup' tools (a pencil), and ‘text markup' tools (a highlighter pen). To the right of each default button is a small triangle pointing downwards; clicking on the triangle gives you access via a drop-down menu to all the tools in the group – choose ‘Expand this button' (last in the list) to have the tools readily accessible.[3]

To get started, look at the text markup tools. There are three in this group: a highlighter pen, a strikeout tool and an underline tool (it's obvious from their icons which is which). To select a tool, click once on its button – the cursor will change to an I-beam imposed on a small selection rectangle. Now click and drag on some text in the pdf just as you would if you were in Word; this will highlight, cross out or underline the text.

At this point you may notice a frustrating thing: Acrobat will not let you mark individual characters – the smallest item you can mark is a word. Similarly Acrobat includes trailing punctuation. You have to accept these limitations; it's easy enough to work out ways round them.[4]

Now double-click on the marked-up text. This will open up a comment box, rather like a sticky note, in which you can type instructions or clarifications. This works with all the text markup and graphic comment tools. Acrobat keeps track of everything typed in these boxes, which you can check by clicking on the ‘Comments' tab on the left-hand side of the main window.[5,6]

To be honest, I don't find these comment boxes useful. They are not obvious when closed and are easily missed by designers and typesetters. Another way of clarifying mark-up, and one more in line with traditional hard-copy proofs, is to use the free text tool for margin notes – these are permanently visible. However, comment boxes could come into their own if you need to list all the amendments in a set of proofs; Acrobat allows you to save this list as a separate document (Tools–Comments–Summarize).

In conjunction with margin notes, I use the highlighter and underline tools to request bold and italic text respectively, and the strikeout tool to delete text.[7]

The free text tool (icon: T+ ) is the only button on the comment toolbar that I use extensively – all the others seem gimmicky or result in markup that can be overlooked by typesetters. I use this tool for margin notes <in angle brackets> and for text insertions. You simply click and drag to outline a rectangle on a text-free area of the page, then type away. Unfortunately, none of the comment tools allows you to format text directly; you have to indicate typestyles either through tags (for example, <b> and </b> for bold text – don't forget to explain conventions!) or via the text markup tools.[8]

All the tools mentioned so far are straightforward to use with mouse and keyboard alone, as are most of the graphic comment tools (those for drawing rectangles, ellipses and straight lines). However, if your client insists on BSI markup, you need the pencil tool. To use this to best effect, a basic pen-based graphics tablet, such as the Wacom Graphire, is helpful, as it is easier to write and draw free-form shapes with a pen than with a mouse. A tablet PC or Wacom Cintiq (which combines a TFT monitor with a graphics tablet) works even better, if you want an excuse to buy one – you can then write directly on the screen, just as you would on paper.

Colour coding and tool properties

Associated with each tool is a set of properties such as author (i.e. who made the comment), colour, line thickness, typeface and typesize. If you are collating proofs, for example, you might use colour as in traditional proofs to indicate sources of amendments; you can also indicate the source (author) explicitly in Acrobat.

To change a tool's properties, control-click (Mac) or right-click (PC) on the markup and choose ‘Properties…' from the contextual menu. From then on, the tool takes on those properties, but any earlier marks keep the previous characteristics. Be warned, though: changing the properties of each tool is tedious and Acrobat 5 doesn't include a direct way of changing them all at once.[9]

Advantages

So why work in this way? Here are a few advantages.

Proofs can be sent out and returned by email, cutting out at least two days postage time for each proof stage.
It is cheaper to send files by email than heavy parcels by post.
Marked-up proofs do not need photocopying – anyone needing hard copy can print the file themselves.
Through the ‘find' tool (binoculars icon) you can check you have marked up all instances of a particular spelling mistake.
Proofs in tiny type can be enlarged to make them easier to read (a boon for aging editors).
A designer can copy free-text insertions from the pdf proofs and paste them directly into their page layout program.
Scrolling through proofs using the arrow keys is far faster than turning physical pages by hand.
Checking new proofs against old is easy – in Acrobat you can tile files vertically (if only Word allowed that directly!), so that you can quickly scan and compare proofs page by page.
Archived pdf files on CD-ROM (say) take less shelf room than archived piles of paper proofs – they are also easier to organise.

From my experience over this last year, Acrobat has joined Word as a must-have tool for on-screen editorial work.

Notes

[1] My thanks are due to Rod Cuff for the descriptions of Acrobat 4. Those of Acrobat 6 are from my early experiences with this upgrade.

[2] The toolbar appears down the left-hand side in Acrobat 4.

[3] In Acrobat 4 there is no small triangle. Instead, you click on the icon and hold down the mouse button to get a pop-up menu.

[4] Acrobat 6 has addressed this problem.

[5] The comment tab doesn't exist in Acrobat 4. However, you can access all annotations by clicking on the Show/Hide Navigation Pane button on the toolbar that's across the top of the window, selecting the Annotations tab and clicking a button at the bottom of the pane.

[6] In Acrobat 6 the facilities for deleting or rewriting text are more straightforward. For example, to mark text to be deleted, highlight it as you would in Word, then hit the delete key; Acrobat strikes through the deleted text. To rewrite text, highlight it as before, then type the replacement; Acrobat puts the rewritten text in a comment note associated with the struck-through text. To add text, simply place the cursor at the point you want the text to go and type away; Acrobat indicates the place with an insertion mark and puts the added text in a comment note. The problem mentioned in the next paragraph still holds, though.

[7] Acrobat 6 adds a wiggly-line option to the underline tool; I now use this for marking up bold text.

[8] Acrobat 6 has addressed this problem.

[9] It's now easy to change properties in Acrobat 6 via the context-sensitive properties toolbar – it takes just a few mouse-clicks each time.

Using Acrobat to mark up pdf proofs

The comment and markup tools

Colour coding and tool properties

Advantages

Further reading

Notes