Organizing my electronic and physical files has always been a chore. My Mac OS X desktop is littered with items I mean to either discard or file. I just don't do it in a timely manner.
I'm making improvements, however. I picked up David Allen's Getting Things Done for my iPod and went about instituting the filing system he outlined in the audio book. If something is worth keeping, file it. Holding useless files obscures useful ones. Slowly my physical files came under control, then the electronic ones. The upcoming version of OS X 10.4, a.k.a. Tiger, introduces Spotlight to "find anything, anywhere" as Apple puts it. Even if the advanced searching capabilities weren't available today, it's no excuse for not organizing your stuff.
My current organizational scheme is very simplistic. I have one root folder named "Filing Cabinet" to hold all my files, organized into folders holding other folders or files. Every time I download a file or create a new one, I make sure I deposit it to the correct location or create a new subfolder for it. There are a number of information organizers available. DEVONthink is one I ran across that seems to fit the bill. Maybe I'll sit down long enough to see if that or any other system works better than my basic filing cabinet system.
After the initial round of organizing, I still had physical papers flying around my desk -- most either duplicate marked-up copies or printouts used for short amounts of time. As it turns out, I like to mark up what I read -- a lot. When I come across a web page with a tutorial, my first inclination is to print out a copy and mark all the things I should focus on. Maybe I would not be compelled to do this if I had a 17" PowerBook or an external monitor. But as it stands, I lose my place on the web page as soon as I switch to Xcode or a Terminal window.
Research journal and conference papers are another matter. Graduate students usually have tens or hundreds of fairly dense research papers to recall. It's very common to jot down notes and highlight the most relevant points in each paper before moving on.
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Refreshing your memory months later requires locating the annotated copy and review, but is far less time-consuming than rereading the entire paper again. I asked a few professors how they managed their research papers. All of them said they print a copy off, annotate, then file. In my case, I ended up with multiple annotated copies of a few papers. A first copy would be at home when I needed to read it at the office, or vice versa. In this day and age, it seemed like there should be a better, electronic solution.
What I really wanted was everything on my laptop and less printed paper to keep track of. My plan was to use the markup tools in Adobe Acrobat 6 to tackle the problem. I'm not to a paperless office just yet, but I'm getting there. For OS X, it's a natural. If you can print it, you can save as a PDF. Below is an introduction to Acrobat for markup if you too want to aim for less paper in your life.
Acrobat is an excellent program for document distribution. Most users are familiar with the freely available Acrobat Reader, allowing anyone to view PDF documents. The full-blown version of Acrobat offers a range of tools to manage document distribution beyond just converting other formats to PDF. If you just have single documents to distribute, the built-in capabilities of OS X suffice. However, if you would like to add annotations, track reviews, merge multiple PDF files, or add custom headers and footers, Acrobat might be for you.
Document distribution is fundamentally different than document creation. Comparing Acrobat and Microsoft Word, both are great at one with limited capabilities for the other.
Acrobat allows minor text edits to PDF documents, but recommends most edits be done on the original document. Word is very popular for generating documents, but requires care for document distribution.
Some individuals learned the hard way Word documents contain a lot more information than what recipients see. I thought Office 2004 corrected this oversight, but alas, the Help document (as seen in the picture below) for Word essentially says one should review and make visible revision marks, comments, and hidden text before distribution. If you must rely on Word for distribution, the best tip I've seen thus far is to convert your Word document to RTF, removing hidden data and other document properties. If your receiving party insists on Word, convert the RTF version back to Word.
 Word document distribution advice. |
In this article I'm focusing on annotating all types of files. Acrobat is the only program I'm aware of suited for this purpose.
Before marking up a document, it must be a PDF or converted to PDF. There are three options within Acrobat and Mac OS X to aid in PDF conversion:
The "Save As PDF" option (as seen below, circled in red) can be found in any application running on Mac OS X. In the menu for the application, select File, then Print. In the Print dialogue, choose Save As PDF. The only application I've run into where this didn't work was in Acrobat itself - it's not necessary.
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For hardcopy documents, scan them in as images using at least 300x300 dpi resolution, black and white. In Acrobat, under the Document menu, select the Paper Capture (OCR) function to use the optical character recognition tools. This will "recognize" text in your scanned image, depending on the quality of your scan. If the capture fails, you won't be able to use any annotations tools dependent on the underlying text -- more on that below.
Although Acrobat includes a web spider for downloading web sites -- you can even specify levels for your capture to restrict itself to the given path or server -- I almost never use it. Most web sites have ads and site navigation around articles for online readers, but you may not have to include those in the capture. Thankfully, most sites, such as this one, offer print-ready versions of articles with fewer ads and typically include the entire story on one web page. Each MacDevCenter.com article has a Print icon (seen here) allowing access to the print-friendly version.
Example of link to printer-friendly version of articles at Mac DevCenter.
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To begin annotating PDF documents, start Acrobat and get your workspace ready by setting up the toolbars most useful for annotating. From the Views menu, select the Toolbars submenu and activate Advanced Commenting, Commenting, and Properties Bar as seen in the picture and circled in red.
 The three toolbars needed, circled in red. |
Acrobat includes numerous annotating tools. Here's a rundown of a few I find helpful:
I'll review how to use each of these tools and give examples of their usage in the next sections.
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 Commenting Toolbar: from left to right Note Tool, Indicated Text Edits,
Stamp Tool (not reviewed), and Highlight Text. |
The Note Tool in the Commenting Toolbar allows users to add notes anywhere on a page. There are two parts to each note -- a place-keeper and a pop-up window holding the text of the note. The available placeholders are pictured below. The default is the Comment icon.
Available Icons for Note Tool placeholders. |
The note itself acts like a pop-up window, as seen below. The pop-up window can be positioned anywhere on the page. If the pop-up is closed, it can be viewed by mousing over the placeholder.
Example of the Note Tool pop-up window. |
Next up in the commenting toolbar are Indicate Text Edits. This set of tools is meant to mark where text should be deleted, changed, or inserted. The changes can be exported to Word and executed automatically. To use any of the features listed in the picture below, first select the text or text location you would like to operate on.
Options for Indicate Text Tool. |
The Insert Text At Cursor (example below) and Add Note To Selected Text options are very similar to the Note Tool, except the placeholder must be associated with a location in the original text.
Indicated Text Comments example. |
The last item of relevance to mention in the commenting toolbar is Highlighting. There are three forms available with this option: Highlighter Tool, Cross-out Text Tool, and Underline Text Tool. To use, select one of the three tools, then select the text you'd like the tool applied to. Properties for most of the tools listed here can be altered. For example, the default highlighter color is yellow. To change, use the Properties Toolbar when the Highlighter Tool is active. The new color will keep for future selections, too. Different tools have different properties -- the Underline Text Tool has the option of squiggly or straight underline in addition to color. Below is a picture of the three tools in action, with varied options and colors.
 Use of the Highlighter Tool with three colors; colored straight and squiggly
underlines; and colored lines to cross out text. |
In the Commenting Toolbar, both Indicate Text Edits and Highlighting are associated with text. If your OCR scan fails to recognize the document text, these two sets of tools cannot be used.
 Advanced Commenting Toolbar: from left to right Drawing Toolbar, Pencil Tool, Attach File (not reviewed) |
The Advanced Commenting Toolbar Drawing Tool, the Text Box Tool, and the Pencil Tool are covered below. These tools yield a surprising number of ways to liven up your PDF document annotations.
The Drawing Tool has a number of shapes: Rectangle, Oval, Arrow, Line, Polygon, Polygon Line, and Cloud Tools. The Polygon and Cloud Tools also have pop-up windows for text by default as shown in the example below. I'm not sure why I'd want to add a cloud to a PDF, but the functionality is there.
 Drawing Tool Examples; Rectangle Tool, Oval Tool, Polygon Line Tool, and
the Cloud Tool. |
The function of Text Box Tool is very similar to the pop-up window associated with many of the tools. However, the Text Box Tool is not a pop-up, but rather an object that is always visible. I don't care for the default settings of yellow background and black border. To alter, skip the fill and border on the text box to make the text appear by itself. Do this by first selecting the Text Box Tool from the toolbar, and then altering attributes in the Properties toolbar. Select No Color for fill and "0 pt" to remove the border. Below are three examples of text boxes.
 Text Box Tool examples: (1) default, (2) no border, lighter background, and (3)
no background or border, colored text. |
The Pencil Tool is good for scribbling free-form figures and comments. As with other tools, the thickness, color, and opacity can be adjusted in the Properties Toolbar. If you have one, tablet input devices are more practical to use than a mouse or touchpad. However, I find my Wacom Graphire tablet difficult to use for this purpose, as it requires good hand-eye coordination. I wish my laptop screen was a touchpad, or for Apple to produce a Mac Tablet! For scanned documents that failed OCR, create a do-it-yourself highlighter. Change the Pencil Tool properties to 6 pt. width, 40% opacity and carefully draw the tool through the text. As you can see below, my hand is not very steady.
 Example of the Pencil Tool for drawing and do-it-yourself highlighting. |
Who would have thought there were so many options to mark up your files within the two commenting toolbars!
While you might be thinking of the possibilities now available to you, here are some issues to be aware of. Printouts of annotated versions as seen on the screen are not an option. When printed, marked-up PDFs have annotations off to the side or on separate pages. I also run into stability issues -- Acrobat 6.0.2 crashes occasionally. If you run Acrobat, be sure to save early and often to be safe. Getting a copy of Acrobat for yourself can be pricey. However, educational pricing is reasonable.
Acrobat is the best solution I've found in my quest for the paperless office. I originally began my investigation over a year ago. At the time, I taught a class with more than 70 students. I was willing to experiment and see if there was a way I could get out of carting student homework around. I tend to loose track of paper and constantly forgot to bring corrected student papers to class for return. Since then, I've adapted my Acrobat techniques to build my paperless office. I'm willing to put up with the few downsides -- saving my work often to get around lurking crashes -- if it means I can carry all my work around on just my laptop and lighten my load.
Note: The text in the examples above is a section of Lorum Ipsum, dummy text used in the printing and typesetting industry.
Julie Starr , CISSP lives in Raleigh, NC, where she is a freelance writer, computer security instructor, and sometimes a computer science PhD student.
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