CODEWITHSUNDEEP
latexannotations
kvaruni
kvaruni

Reputation: 842

Mathematical annotations in a PDF file

I like to annotate papers I read in a digital way. Numerous programs exist to help in this process. For example, on OS X one can use programs such as Skim or even Preview. However, making annotations is dreadful when one wishes to add mathematical annotations, such as formulas or greek letters. A cumbersome "solution" is to select the desired symbol one by one using the Special Characters palette, though this considerably slows down the annotation process.

Is there any way to add mathematical annotations to a PDF? The only two limitations that I would impose on a solution is that 1) the mathematical text needs to be selectable, i.e. it must be text and 2) I want to limit the number of programs I need to make the process as painless as possible.

Some of the more promising solutions I have tried include generating LaTeX with LaTeXiT, but it seems to be impossible to add a PDF on top of another PDF. Another attempt was to use jsMath to generate the symbols and copy-paste these as annotation using one of the jsMath fonts. This results in unreadable, incorrect characters.

Upvotes: 11

Views: 8641

Answers (3)

alex.jordan
alex.jordan

Reputation: 368

13 years later, and I stumbled on this page. I have a low budget web page tool I use for putting simple unicode math constructions into the clipboard and pasting in text annotation boxes.

https://spot.pcc.edu/~ajordan/unimathcb/index.html

Probably there are better tools out there that do general PDF annotation and allow for LaTeX input. But this tool meets the OP conditions 1 and 2.

Some unicode math characters are not represented by a given font, so that can be a limitation.

Upvotes: 0

Sparkler
Sparkler

Reputation: 2913

Low-level solution: import the PDF to a LaTeX document, and place notes by providing their exact location (full example here), or use the pdfcomment package which places the comments automatically (full example here). Both ways support LaTeX math code.

High-level solution: if you're ok with editing one pdf page at a time, then import a pdf page into Inkscape, and annotate with LaTeX using TexText.

Upvotes: 3

Charles Stewart
Charles Stewart

Reputation: 11837

You can paste one PDF on top of another in Context using layers. I said a bit about how to do this in my answer to the How do I embed a source PDF onto an existing page in a PDF qn

Upvotes: 1

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