Trying to View Annotations/Comments pane for .pdfs

When I view an annotated .pdf document (sometimes 100s of pages) in DVTP Office, I have to click each highlight on each page before the comment/annotation bubble pops open on the side - is there a way to view the entire document with comments/annotation bubbles already opened, and not have to click on every one?

I use this feature in depositions and witness exams (I’m a lawyer); In my separate outline (Circus Ponies). I hyperlink from the outline to the annotated (i.e., questions about the document) document page in DVTP. However, I cannot seem to get the annotaions to pop open automatically or as a preference for viewing.

Any ideas?

Lisa Peck
PECK PETERSON, LLP
San Jose, CA 95113
Lisa@peckpeterson.com

Not a feature of DEVONthink, but you are right - it would be useful.

On the other hand, it is easy to open PDFs from DEVONthink into OS X"s Preview app, which (on Yosemite) has an excellent view with all notations shown in the sidebar.

Hello Lisa

The disadvantage of opening the document in preview is that you lose the direct page linking.

I would suggest restricting yourself to just using highlighting and graphical annotations on the pdf itself and storing textual annotations separately in DT. This has the advantage that all the textual annotation can easily be pulled together when preparing a brief or for argument, either in detail or in a tabular format. Its easy then just to abstract a sub-set of documents for a particular witnesses or for issue review. With a bit of setting up you can do everything that a tool like casemap does but with a lot more flexibility to design your workflow.

You might find the approach in this thread to be useful for preparing tabular summaries: [url]Export an index of annotations to a numbers spreadsheet]

There is quite a bit of information about how to go about using DT in a litigation context in this thread: [url]Put up Example page]

A tool like like Highlights is also terrific for extracting annotations from pdf: http://highlightsapp.net

Frederiko