If you're working in a serious review session and the comments on the pages become a little overwhelming, you need a management tool. Fortunately, Adobe Reader provides you with the Comments pane to organize your comments.
All the comments you create with the Commenting toolbar and the Drawing Markups toolbar are listed in the Comments pane dynamically as comments are created. Within the pane are tools and menu commands to help you manage and organize comments. The pane is where you work with comments you receive from other users, where you comment on documents for your own personal use, and where you participate in review sessions.
You can see comments in the Comments pane for all PDF documents that contain them. If a file is not enabled with usage rights for Adobe Reader, the Comments pane offers a limited number of tools and commands for navigating and viewing comments. When files are enabled with usage rights, the Comments pane offers many more tools for editing, sorting, and marking comments. This chapter refers to using the Comments pane only for documents enabled with usage rights.
Note
If you don't have a file enabled with Adobe Reader usage rights, use the draftLayout_comments.pdf file from www.peachpit.com/adobereader7. Add several comments to several pages in the document as described in Chapters 11, “Using Comment Tools,” and Chapter 12, “Working with Stamp Comments.” Use this file for all steps in this chapter.
The Comments pane is docked in the Navigation pane. When you open some files containing comments, the pane may open automatically when the file opens. If the Comments pane is closed, click the Comments tab and the pane expands horizontally like the Attachments pane.
As you add comments to pages, the comment notes are dynamically added to the Comments pane. You can view, organize, edit, and search comment notes using the Comments pane.
Comment pop-up notes appear on the pages where comments are added. If you have several comments in a document containing many pages, browsing the comment notes by scrolling pages takes quite a bit of time. If you open the Comments tab, you can view comment note contents in a single pane without scrolling pages.
To view comments in the Comments pane:
Open a document containing several comments. If you saved the draftLayout.pdf document after working through the steps in Chapters 11 and 12, you should have a file containing several comments. Use this file. If you don't have a file with comments, use the draftLayout_comments.pdf file.
Drag the separator bar up to expand the palette so you can see more comments listed in the pane (Figure 14.1).
At the left side of the pane, you see comments listed by page number. Click the + (plus) symbol to expand the list of comments for each page. After clicking, the + (plus) symbol changes to a – (minus) symbol. Clicking the – (minus) symbol collapses the list.
Notice the Comment icons and author names. Each comment is identified according to comment type and the author who created it.
Click the Next and Previous buttons at the top of the pane to move forward and backward among the comments.
If you want to expand all comments in the list, click the Expand All tool at the top of the pane. Conversely, click Collapse All to collapse all comments.
Beside each Comment icon is another + (plus) symbol. Click the + (plus) to expand individual comments. When a comment is expanded, you see the author name, a text description of the comment type, and the comment creation date (Figure 14.2). When you click Expand All, the pages and the individual comment list are expanded.
Tip
If you want to edit comment pop-up notes, you can select a comment in the Comments list and edit the comment note text that appears to the right of the author name. Be aware that the text appears in the Comments pane whether or not a file is enabled with usage rights. However, you can only select and edit note text in the Comments pane when the file is enabled with usage rights.
Perhaps you're reviewing legacy PDF files, created in earlier versions of Acrobat, where comments were added to a file, and you want to navigate and view the comment notes. Since versions of Acrobat prior to version 7 don't permit the addition of usage rights, you can't make comments on the file.
However, when you're viewing a file that isn't enabled with usage rights, the Comments pane does offer tools to help you navigate through comments in the document. This can be particularly helpful in long documents where comments were added randomly throughout.
Figure 14.3 shows the Comments pane opened on a document not enabled with usage rights. You can use the Collapse All, Expand All, Next, and Previous tools to show and navigate comments, the Show pull-down menu to open and close comment notes, and the Search tool to search comment-note text. The Options menu only offers commands for scanning the document for comments and for showing the Tracker, a window that lists the reviews you're currently engaged in.
You can mark comments in two ways. The Checkmark tool lets you mark a comment for your personal use. You might use a checkmark to mark comment notes that you've reviewed. The recipients don't see your checkmarks when you send a PDF file in review sessions to other users.
The other way to mark comments is to use the Set Status pull-down menu commands. You can choose to accept comments, reject them, or mark them as cancelled or completed. After setting comments' status, you can view comments according to the status you assigned.
To mark comments for status:
Continue using the same file and be sure the Comments pane is expanded.
To select a comment, click in the area where the Comment icon and author name appear in the list.
Click the box that appears between the + (plus) symbol and the Comment icon. An alert dialog opens (Figure 14.4).
The alert dialog informs you that the checkmarks you add to the comment list are not visible to other users. If you don't want this dialog to open each time you mark a comment, click the check box for Don't show again. Click OK to dismiss the dialog.
A checkmark is added to the box to the left of the Comment icon (Figure 14.5).
Select another comment and open the Set Status pull-down menu. Select the Accepted menu option (Figure 14.6).
When you set a status to a comment, the status mark is noted below the comment in the Comments list and includes a description of the status mark and the date it was created (Figure 14.7). Select additional comments and select different status items from the Set Status pull-down menu. Save your edits in order to follow steps in the next section.
After assigning status marks to comments, you can sort the comments by their status, as well as by other comment attributes. You might make comments in a review session, review all comments, mark them for status, and then want to view only the comments marked as Accepted. If you're editing a document in an authoring program, you can toggle back and forth between the document viewed in the Reader window and the document you're editing in the authoring program. As you make changes in the original document, you can use the Checkmark tool to check off the comments you've finished editing according to the suggestions in the comment notes.
To sort comments according to status and other comment attributes:
Continue using the same file where you set status on comments.
In the Comments pane, click Show > Show by Status > Accepted (Figure 14.8).
A warning dialog opens informing you that when you hide comments, any replies you receive in a review session are also hidden. Click OK in the dialog (Figure 14.9).
Review the Comments list. As you scroll the list, the only comments shown in the list are the ones marked as Accepted (Figure 14.10).
Leave the Comments list sorted to follow the steps in the next section.
Can I sort comments by attributes other than status?
If you want to sort comments for a particular status, the sort list shows you all comments according to your sort selection in the Comments list. You can further sort comments in subcategories. For example, suppose you want to sort comments according to status such as Accepted and further sort the comments for a particular reviewer and have the resultant sort appear listed in chronological order of pages. To sort with multiple criteria, select Show by Status and select Accepted from the pull-down menu. Return to the Show pull-down menu, select Show by Reviewer, and select a reviewer from the submenu (Figure 14.11). The sort results show just those comments marked as accepted for a specific reviewer.
Open the Sort By pull-down menu and select a sort order from the menu options. In Figure 14.12 the menu choice is Page. The results in the Comments list show all Accepted comments from Nancy sorted according to the Page numbers where the comments appear.
Comments can be exported as a file, and that exported file can then be imported into a PDF document. The file that's exported is a Form Data Format (FDF) file and is considerably smaller and quicker to send than a PDF file containing comments.
You can sort comments by any of the sort criteria discussed earlier in this chapter and export only the comments pertaining to a given sort. For example, you might want to sort comments by reviewer and export a file containing only the comments you made to the PDF document. You can send the exported file to another user who can then import the comments and see only the remarks you made in a comment review session.
When you import comments, be certain that you use the same document or a duplicate of the document in which the comments were made. Although you can use the Import Comments command on any file enabled with usage rights, the comments won't make much sense if imported into a document that doesn't have the same text and images as the original file.
To export and import comments:
Use the same file you used in the last section.
Select Sort By > Author in the Comments pane. The comments are sorted by author. If you added new comments, your name should appear in the list.
Note
You can export comments without sorting them. You can select just the comments you want to export in the Comments pane and then from the Comments pane's Options pull-down menu select Export Selected. Only the comments you selected are exported. If you want to export all comments, choose Edit > Select All, and then select Document > Comments > Export Comments. All comments are exported regardless of what you have selected in the Comments pane.
Click an author name in the list.
Open the Options pull-down menu and select Export Selected Comments (Figure 14.13).
The Export Comments dialog opens. Navigate your hard drive and select the folder in which to save the exported file. Click Save and the comments are saved as a file.
Open the draftLayout.pdf document, which contains no comments.
Expand the Comments list by clicking the Comments tab. From the Options pull-down menu select Import Comments.
The Import Comments dialog opens. Navigate your hard drive and locate the FDF file containing the exported comments. Select the file and click Select.
The comments are imported into the original document in the right order and placement. Review the pages, and you'll find only the comments from the status selection you made imported into the document.
