The future for PDF document reviewing with Nitro Pro
The Nitro team uses PDF-related markup and review tools extensively. In the product and support side of things, there are specifications and interfaces to discuss, in marketing, there are web pages, flyers, boxes, logos and more, and at a management level, there’s regularly agreements, contracts and the like to circulate and finalize.
Where I think PDF stands apart from the review tools of Microsoft Word and Excel is the fact that it feels much more like reviewing a paper document. All the tools you’re used to, such as text highlighters, pens, notes and stamps make it intuitive, and most importantly, allow you to annotate any part of a page. This is very different to applications like Microsoft Word, which are limited to just commenting on text content and become confusing when content is inserted, edited and deleted during the reviewing process.
For those of you using Nitro Pro for commenting, you’ll already be familiar with the set of annotation tools (full details on our annotate & highlight PDF page), and you might also be familiar with the fact that working through a large amount of comments can be challenging. What I wanted to do today was give you a sneak peek at what we’re working on to help you work more efficiently.
The first one (see the screenshot below) is summarizing comments. What you can see there are some very basic mock-ups and some of the early comment summary output we’ve been generating. If you’re familiar with adding comments in Microsoft Word, then you’ve probably seen the ‘balloons’ you can display along the right side of the page to see comments and changes. As the interface of Nitro Pro and Office 2007 is so similar, we’ve tried to follow the same principle, so moving between the two applications has the smallest learning curve.
The functionality and design has come from talking to users who like to comment (a lot!). From there the product management and development teams have worked together to establish what’s possible. Simple wireframes have evolved into fully working demonstrations. The support, sales and marketing teams have had demos and shared their thoughts. And as each iteration has passed we’ve refined the functional capabilities and how summary output will look and print.
There are several benefits you’ll get using the Summarize Comments feature. Firstly, you’ll be able to look at all the text feedback on the page in one go, and, with connectors between the text feedback and each markup on the page, easily follow what’s going on. Secondly, if you like to use paper as part of your review process, you can print out your summary and work with good old pens and markers — while we all love to save paper whenever we can, the fact is it’s sometimes much easier to do some of the reviewing on paper, especially when working with large documents and many comments.
We are also working on significantly improving the Comments pane, making it easier to work with large amounts of comments, read and add/edit text in there, and better handle replies. The most noticeable change is the support for multi-line display, which will make it much easier to read longer comments without switching from the pane back out to the note on the page. The screenshot below show a very early demonstration of the new pane in action.
This is really just a taste of what we’re working on, which you’ll be able to get your hands on later in the year with our next major release. If you’re a paid-up owner of Nitro PDF Professional and you’d like to have the chance to try out upcoming private betas, please head to our beta sign up page and enter your details. If you’d like to like to see our new convert PDF to Word technology in action, follow the link and enter nitro as your invite code to try it via our online beta service.
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