Correcting Proofs via PDF Commenting

The “paperless office” often works better in theory than the real world, but it is becoming feasible to mark text corrections electronically. The free Adobe Reader provides a convenient means for doing so via “PDF Commenting” (also known as “Acrobat Commenting”) once this capability has been enabled for a given PDF. The basic commenting process is quite simple. You open the enabled PDF with Adobe Reader version 7 or later and use the Note Tool to make little “sticky notes,” where you describe the correction. A little “speech balloon” icon indicates where your note goes on the PDF page, and after the note window has been closed you can click on its icon to re-open the window for review or revision; you can also reposition the icon by dragging it with the mouse. When you have finished making notes, you save the PDF (under a new name if you want to retain the original), and it is ready to send it on its way. This bare-bones approach is good enough for many purposes, and it has worked well for me in several projects. It minimizes fuss while preserving the method’s singular advantage: communicating corrections over the Internet, i.e., quickly and cheaply. Like other computer tasks, PDF commenting is no panacea; rather, it is a tool offering a finite set of features which may or may not serve for a given project. In other words, one should not suspend common sense. First of all, this is a method is for marking corrections: copy-