If you’ve ever been asked to comment on or revise a PDF and you were not provided with the MS Word version of the document, this post is for you. As a project manager in my day job and an adjunct professor as my side gig, one of my primary tasks is to review, comment on, revise, and approve written work. I do this daily. Let’s just say me and Track Changes are best friends. I depend on an easy to use and versatile revision system that tracks my comments (and sometimes that of my colleagues simultaneously) and need the software to work with me when I want to insert a question, comment or suggestion for the author. PDFs don’t allow this kind of flexibility. All they allow are random sticky notes that you drop as close to what you are commenting on as possible. This doesn’t make for an efficient form of communication with the author.

Well, my life changed recently when a student of mine introduced me to a free iPad app called neu.Annotate. My students and I had been engaged in a casual conversation about personal preferences for reading course materials. All of my students in this particular class were working on their doctoral degrees so you can imagine many of them were set in their ways, having been in school settings for many many years, having already received their bachelors and masters degrees. One of my students argued it is wasteful for professors to produce course readers with tens of articles totaling hundreds of pages printed for each student. Instead, she exclaimed, “we should go paperless. Much of what we read is already available digitally, so why not take advantage of that?” Another student disagreed. She argued that she couldn’t handle reading articles on a computer screen and needed to write all over it, highlight important passages, scribble in the margins. I agreed with both students, saying I want to go paperless, but also need a way to write all over the documents, often PDFs. This is when a third student chimed in to offer an app for anyone who owns an iPad. Neu.Annotate has both a free and paid version for iPad users, although I am not sure what the added value is for the paid version (it doesn’t seem much different from the app description). With the free version of neu.Annotate, you can open documents sent to your iPad in a user-friendly app that allows you to highlight text with the swipe of your finger, add text in different colors either via a stylus or via a text box feature. You can also add images and free form drawings. Neu.Annotate also organizes all your annotated PDFs by allowing you to tag them.

Of course, as with anything, it’s not a perfect app. I’ve never quite perfected a clean writing in of text (it always looks a little sloppy) and the text box feature sometimes requires a few steps too many to be worth the effort, especially when you have more to write and only a small margin to write it in. For example, it takes a few extra steps to reduce the size of the text box to fit in the margins and often times you have to rotate the text to fit vertically. Nonetheless, if you own an iPad and, like me, need to review and comment on written work or want to read all your college/grad school reading in a paperless fashion, this is a must have app. My iPad and I are the envy of my colleagues. I show off my annotation abilities and have even emailed annotated PDFs back to the authors through my iPad. It’s a great way to get around the issue of not being able to use a word processor with its complex track changes capabilities. I’m certainly a fan and I thank my student on a daily basis for introducing me to this iPad app. Who says professors can’t learn from their students?