G. Milde wrote:
> A Adobe Writer Pro can produce documents that can be annoted using the
> free Reader, right?
yes.
> As free software (pdflatex, ps2pdf, ...) is able to create PDF documents
> (like the $200 Adobe Writer), shouldn't it be possible to upgrade them to
> include annotations with acroread? Or to have a simple command line tool
> that modifies PDFs to toggle this annotation feature?
Theoretically, yes. Practically, no such tool exists yet (AFAIK). Adobe, for
obvious reasons, didn't release the specifications for the annotation
support feature. Most likely, someone will just revert engineer that
eventually.
Until that, there is not possibility to change the permissions of a pdf file
in a way that Acroread users can add annotations _without_ Acrobat Pro.
However, it is possible to add annotations to a pdf file via pdfspecials,
i.e., if you insert some code into your document, pdflatex (given that it
is fairly recent) can pass it to the PDF, where it appears as an annotation
mark.
With the attached sty file, I can insert such annotations with
\pdfremark{Hello, this is a comment!}
I have not tested this throughoutly, but it seems to do the job quite well.
I have also dropped a note about it on the wiki (and uploaded the file, for
what it's woth)
http://wiki.lyx.org/FAQ/PDF
Jürgen%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
%% This is just a summary snippet of what I (Jürgen Spitzmüller
%% <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>) have found in the newsgroups
%% about inserting annotations into pdf files.
%% You probably need pdftex >= v. 0.14 to get this work, older versions
%% have not been tested.
%%
%% Credits go to the people I have taken the code from, especially
%% Carsten Zerbst (cf.
%%
http://groups.google.de/group/de.comp.text.tex/browse_thread/thread/f761a21ddda537d5
%%
%% usage \pdfremark[Remark Title]{Remark Text}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
\ProvidesPackage{pdfremark}
[2005/08/03 v0.1 Insert annotations to PDF files]
% Check if PDF is being used
\newif\ifpdf
\ifx\pdfoutput\undefined
\pdffalse
\else
\pdfoutput=1
\pdftrue
\fi
\ifpdf
% pdftex versions < 0.14
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
\def\pdfstartlink{\pdfannotlink}}{}
\newcommand{\pdfremark}[2][]{%
\mbox{%
\pdfstartlink
%% Placement of the annotation
%width \linewidth
height \baselineskip
%depth 0pt
user {%
/Subtype /Text
/T (#1)
/Contents (#2)
}%
\pdfendlink
}%
}
\else
\newcommand{\pdfremark}[2][]{}
\fi
% finis
