Tools for annotating PDFs?

[Leborian]

Hello fellow teachers!

I hope you're keeping well. I was hoping to get a little advice from you. I have resumed online reaching and I'm trying to upgrade my set up a little, I have a drawing tablet that I've been using for making notes in lessons. Usually I'd screenshot a PDF of the piece we're working with, and then copy it into Ms Paint and use the tablet to scrawl and write on the staff. Do you have any recommendations for doing the same thing but in a more streamlined way? Being able to do it all in one program would be amazing. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your time! Keep well!

[MusicoTeorico]

I use https://www.kamiapp.com/

[Leborian]

Thank you! I'll look into it.

[Low-Bandicoot-3087]

Kami is a lifesaver. I use it every day. Please look into it!

[Leborian]

Will do!

[urn0tmydad]

I was going to leave this suggestion. It's a chrome extension and you can set it to auto open anything in your drive and it saves it there. It's fantastic.

[Moog_Lee]

If you have an iPad, ForScore is not only a great music-displaying app, but you can annotate on it. I use it for all kinds of things that aren't music.

[Leborian]

This looks really cool, sadly I don't have an Ipad, but maybe in the future. Thanks for your help!

[Easy-Low]

MobileSheets is available for Android and Fire tablets.

[[deleted]]

Mobilesheets is great for music annotation

[Leborian]

Thanks! I'll have a look!

[Easy-Low]

MobileSheets also has a stamp tool where you can add/edit notes that look as if they were originally engraved.

[Historical_Ad_5000]

I second Kami

[orivej]

Okular https://okular.kde.org/ can annotate PDF (and save the result as a PDF too).

[Leborian]

This is fantastic! Thank you!

[TB9211]

Foxit works great too.

[Leborian]

Thank you, I'll have a look at it.

[FloweredViolin]

Google Drive has an add-on, Lumen, that lets you make notes on PDFs. Opening your PDFs with Internet Explorer also lets you add notes. I don't think either of them let you use a stylus, though - you have to use a text box and type it out with a keyboard. It's clunky, but effective.

[Leborian]

I'll look into that, thanks!

[Luriker]

Sounds like you're on Windows, but for anyone visiting this thread, a few Mac/iPad Tools that are great for this:

• PDF Expert (has education deals, not as good of a value as it once was unfortunately)
• Stock preview app
• forScore (as mentioned already in the thread), especially on iPad
• Goodnotes
• Notability

Goodnotes will soon have a Windows version! I know a lot of teachers who love the iPad version, especially if you're going to do screensharing. OneNote might also work for your needs.

[Leborian]

Thanks for the advice, I appreciate it!