PDF Annotate Tool?
Are there any plans to add an annotation tool for participants to take notes in PDF? We provide a syllabus for our online and live courses that includes PDFed images of the PPT slides. We'd love to have a tool embedded in the LMS, instead of sending people to products that aren't supported, like these: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/free-pdf-annotation-tools/
1 Response
I can see how it would be nice to give users a default annotation tool. However, the nature of how PDFs are handled on the web makes it extremely difficult to implement and also provide a good experience to the user. Because PDFs are always handled by the user's native applications, either through the browser or a PDF viewer native to the user's device, we don't control the handling of the PDF and have extremely limited capabilities for interacting with it from the browser. From one user to another, what viewer opens the PDF is dependent on what they have installed on their device and/or what browser they are using.
There are a small handful of tools that get around this by converting the PDF to HTML so that the website can interact with it and support annotation. We would have to look at the tradoffs+implementation vs. benefits of this. The primary tradeoff is the user will no longer be able to view the PDF in their native app that they are both familiar with, likely provide a much more tailored experience for their device, better integration/performance, and might have features the online tool didn't implement. For example, the CrocoDoc tool in the linked article has issues printing as it includes the headers from the website, so one must be savvy enough to realize that you have to use the download link and then print the downloaded file using your native PDF viewer. Some of them convert the PDF to images and so the text becomes blurred. Most of them are free for only personal use and thus would not be free for an enterprise integration, plus there would be implementation time in integrating with an external third party since most of them are software-as-service type provides.
From your description, it sounds like you are looking at this not as a collaborative tool between Learners/Instructor, but simply as a tool for personal annotations for a single learner. I can't speak in an official capacity, but given the potential implementation challenges, and the fact that anything we do will probably be a worse experience for the user than a native application they could obtain themselves, I don't think this would be high on the list of things for us to likely pursue.
Personally, I would be a bit frustrated if a site didn't provide me the PDF directly and instead provided me an HTML page that "looks" like a PDF but doesn't actually behave like a PDF, in that I don't get the same tools I have access to in my native PDF viewer for my desktop/mobile device.
