Any way to make Adobe Acrobat comments searchable?

[Tom B. 2]

I am using Evernote Premium on Mac. I need to do a lot of highlighting and commenting of PDF's. The native Annotate function in Evernote is basically useless because it looks like something out of a cartoon.

 

Is there any way to make Evernote index comments in Adobe Acrobat Pro? Is there another third-party program that has good commenting functionality that is searchable in Evernote?

[gazumped 11,658]

Hi.  A PDF file is a 'finished' snapshot of a document designed to show it in a fixed state exactly like a photograph.  The content of the PDF can be text (or OCR'd into text) so it is searchable,  but 'adding to' a finished snapshot of a document is kind've a contradiction in terms.  Is there any chance you can obtain the original drafts of documents before they are printed to PDF?  If so,  make your comments there and then print to searchable PDF.  If not,  try to find an app that will convert a PDF to a word-processor file (the conversion is not always completely successful).  You could make your comments there and re-save the output to searchable PDF.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

I am using Evernote Premium on Mac. I need to do a lot of highlighting and commenting of PDF's. The native Annotate function in Evernote is basically useless because it looks like something out of a cartoon.

 

Is there any way to make Evernote index comments in Adobe Acrobat Pro? Is there another third-party program that has good commenting functionality that is searchable in Evernote?

 

AFAIK, Evernote will search only the text of the PDF, not the comments.  I don't see any way of changing how Evernote behaves.

 

However, you can use Adobe Acrobat, and some 3rd party PDF apps, to extract the comments you made in the PDF to another file.  You could then copy the text of this file and paste into the Evernote Note that contains the PDF.  Then Evernote search would find your comments.