Annotating Adobe Reader PDFs with math symbols

Question

Many of the math textbooks and other literature I read is in PDF format, so I frequently find myself annotating these with the Adobe Reader comments tool.

I did find a helpful guide here, but sometimes I'd like the option of inserting math symbols, too. Has anyone found a reliable way to insert math symbols, TeX, or other arbitrary formatting into the annotations?

So far, the best I've come up with is to enter the unicode prefixed by "0x" and hit alt+X after it. Maybe with the Adobe javascript SDK you could write a script to shortcut this.

Answer 1

I don't think any of the current commercial editors make this easy, which is too bad. I am sure the vendors monitor this site, so there is hope.

In the meantime, here is a manual workaround.

1. Use tikz to create your comment boxes. Here are the two examples I found to be most relevant: Boxes and Positioning. Play around with the options to get both the shape and the placement you want. Generate a pdf file from the latex source that contains your comments.

2. IMPORTANT: if your comments end before the last page of the original document, insert:

   \pagebreak{}           % create empty page
   \thispagestyle{empty}  % get rid of page numbers et al
   ~                      % put a space so the page gets generated
   

   before your \end{document}, to get an empty last page. The following command will reuse the last page of your comments document on all subsequent pages of the original document.

3. Use a recent version of pdftk with the multistamp command to overlay your equations file with your original file like so:

   pdftk original.pdf multistamp comments.pdf output out.pdf
   

   Also see this question.

Answer 2

The free (as speech) PDF tool, Okular, supports this functionality by putting latex formula directly between $$...$$.