Best PDF Annotator Mac of 2021

Annotations are essential in PDFs as you can’t add comments as you can in MS Word or Google Docs during a review and approval process.

You’ll need professional software to make PDF annotations such as mark up with highlights, underlines, and strikethroughs, adding text boxes or inserting sticky notes, shapes, and freehand drawings. You are also able to write comments on a PDF page without affecting the layout.

What is the best PDF annotator for Mac? How to annotate a PDF on Mac? In this article, we'll recommend PDF Reader Pro as the best PDF annotator Mac and dive into the details.

Image Source: Upsplash

What Are the Main Use Cases for PDF Annotation?

PDF annotations are beneficial for a variety of reasons. Let’s take a look at some of the scenarios where they would prove helpful.

• Making Notes: PDF annotations are extremely helpful for students, educators, scholars, developers and designers when they have complex documents, such as thesis or paper, technical specifications, they can directly make annotations for the content they think that are important. Most designers choose to export their designs in PDF to share for review. So other reviewers may make some comments for the design.

• Proofreading: Whether you’re writing a novel, legal contract, or advertising copy, you’ll want a proofreader to review your content before it gets published. PDF annotations ensure your original content remains intact but allow proofreaders to make valuable suggestions. Businesses, organizations, or the government often take approvals for some projects in digital proposals.

• Contract Review: By saving a legal document as a PDF, reviewers can only read the content. However, they can annotate the content with what and why needs changing, so the original content remains intact.

• Catalog and Magazine Review: Print catalogs and magazines both have to undergo several review stages. Handling multiple pages would be tricky, which includes the printing, annotating, scanning and sending process. But by saving all pages as a single PDF file, reviewers can toggle back and forth and propose suggestions and changes with annotations.

• Remote Collaboration: Work from home or remote marketing teams can't gather around a PDF and provide feedback. They need a way to share instant feedback that's not via Email, Slack, or some other digital channel where it might get lost. For this case, a PDF annotator can achieve all of them.

 

How to Add Annotations to PDFs with PDF Reader Pro

PDF Reader Pro provides the best experience for annotating PDF documents with various annotation tools in a simpler way. Follow up the how-to guide to explore what annotation functions are there.

Step 1: Mark up PDF Text 

Activate the annotation mode by tapping the ‘Tools’ icon in the top toolbar. Then choose the text you want to highlight/underline/strikethrough or freehand drawing like a pen on physical paper. Yellow is the default highlight color. A plenty of diverse colors are also supported to change if you'd like.

Step 2: Make Text Notes for Review

Click anywhere in the PDFs and create a new text box or anchored note to type new texts in for focused review. It really helps while creating and completing essays or notes in PDF documents.

 

Step 3: Draw Shapes in PDF

If you want to add shapes, here are several types of shapes, such as Square, Circle, Arrow and Line. You can choose any of them to draw as you desired.

Step 4: Add Stamp into PDF

Easily add special stamps to your PDF files. Use dozens of predesigned stamps such as "Approved" or "Sign Here", or create your own custom stamps with texts, images or dynamic stamps with date and time to speed up the whole process.

 

Step 5. Add Handwritten Signature to PDF

Here are two options for you to add a signature, one way  is using Keyboard or Trackpad to create a signature. Another is to upload an image to save as a signature. You can ‘Drop Image Here’ or ‘Select a File’, and then click the "Save" button and put the signature in the right position.

Step 6: Insert Customizable Table into PDF

It is so free to insert tables which consist of rows and columns of cells into PDF documents. Choose the table style and customize cell width/height, background color, border color and line width/style to meet your requirements.

Final Thoughts

Now that you have an idea of PDF annotation capabilities. If you need to add comments or markup your PDF files, it's necessary to find the right PDF annotation software to use. 

 

If you want to make simple annotations to your PDF document, then you also can use Preview, which is the default PDF program on Mac. It is a free program, though it is meant more as a PDF reader than a PDF editor or annotator.

If you need to do more than simple annotations in your PDF, you'll likely need a professional PDF annotator for Mac. One of the best PDF annotators is PDF Reader Pro. It is a professional, yet affordable all-in-one PDF solution. Free Download or Buy PDF Reader Pro right now!