PDF View / Annotation Work Flow§

What§

Find tools to streamline the workflow in PDF§

Why§

There are some challenges if you use Adobo PDF Read / PDF Xchange when:§

  • Present the annotation of PDF during the meeting is painful since the annotation size is very small, and it required a lot of mouse click to show the annotations.

  • May need to quickly jump from one annotation to another OR another page OR do a quick search, sometimes the search function is not that good in the adobe PDF read / PDF changeX.

  • There maybe some actions / notes during the meeting. If we could take the notes within the PDF and also export a clear doc that would be very helpful for team to track.

  • Edit experience (for annotation) is really very bad in the current PDF software.

How§

Installation§

  1. MacOS

    1. Install poppler & automake

      brew install poppler automake

    2. Set the env path for pkg-config

      export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/Cellar/pkg-config:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig"

    3. Install pdf-tools from MELPA

    4. Activate pdf-tools

      (pdf-tools-install)

    5. Install org-pdftools from MELPA

    6. Activate org-pdftools

      (require 'org-pdftools)
(add-hook 'pdf-view-mode-hook 'org-pdftools-setup-link)
(add-hook 'org-mode-hook 'org-pdftools-setup-link)

Use Case§

  1. Present PDF

    Start emacs open the PDF from dired. + - to zoom in / out; P fit to page, W fit width, H fit Height.

  2. Jump to annotation from list

    C-c C-a l List annotation, hit SPACE to jump to the annotation from list.

  3. Edit annotation

    C-c C-a l List annotation, hit RET to edit the annotation; via Mouse selection and left-click add annotation.

  4. Store link in org

    C-c l OR M-x org-store-link to store the link in current location and swtich to org buffer C-c C-l insert link. Via mouse hit the link to jump back the location of the PDF file.

Reference§

PDF-tools org-pdftools