This section describes how to annotate pages with objects like text boxes, highlights and underlines, lines, arrows and other shapes, form fields and links. You can also use text boxes to correct typos and make other small alterations to the text. (This is done by overlaying the text to be corrected with an opaque text box.)
Static annotations:
Static annotations are objects that PDF Nomad adds to the page stream when a PDF document is generated. These objects are not editable afterwards by most PDF editors, thus making them eminently suitable to permanently alter the visual contents of PDF pages (e.g. masking out text and graphics, or making minor corrections to written text, like correcting typos.)
Static annotations can be arbitrarily rotated by holding down the command button while pointing at one of the four resize thumbs on the sides of the object and the clicking and dragging (the cursor will change to a rotate cursor when you hover over resize thumb while holding down the command key). Alternatively, if you use a trackpad, you can rotate selected annotations by hovering above a selected annotation and performing a rotate gesture with two fingers on the trackpad.
Dynamic annotations:
These are the standard annotations as defined by the PDF format. They remain editable by PDF editors after the PDF has been created. They are especially useful for exchanging markup and comments on shared documents.
To add annotations to a page, activate annotation mode by clicking the middle segment of the View Mode button in the toolbar. This will show the annotations bar at the top of the preview canvas.
The left half of the annotations bar is used to select the type of annotation you want to add. The right half can be used to alter annotation properties, like color, line width and font. The button on the far right of the bar shows a list of all annotations in the document.
Shape annotations draw primitive shapes. They allow you to mark up the page with rectangles, ovals, lines, arrow and even free-form drawings.
Shape annotations come in dynamic and static variety, so you can choose the appropriate type depending on whether you want the annotation to remain editable after saving the document. There are a number of static annotation types that do not have a dynamic counterpart.
To add an annotation simply select the desired annotation type from the popup menu, then click or drag on the page to place the annotation. Simply clicking will place the annotation at a default size. If you click and drag, the annotation will be sized according to your drag. There are two annotations that work somewhat differently when they are created: Polyline and Sketch:
Free Text annotations draw a post-it style note (by default with yellow background) directly on the page on which they are created. To create a free text annotation select the free text annotation option from the popup menu and either click on a page, or drag a selection rectangle on a page. The first method will create a default sized annotation, the latter method will create an annotation sized according to the selection rectangle.
You add a static text box by clicking on a point on a page (without dragging to size the box). A new text box is created with the bottom left (origin) of the first letter at the position of the click. You can start typing straight away, and the text box will grow as needed to accommodate the text as it is typed. To exit typing mode, click with the mouse anywhere outside of the box. Static text boxes are often used to make minor corrections to a line of text on a page.
You can also add a text box by clicking anywhere on a page and dragging to size the box before releasing the click. In this case the text box will have a static size as you type. It will neither grow nor shrink.
An auto-resizing text box remains auto-resizable until you manually adjust its size by dragging one of the control handles when the text box is selected but not in typing mode. Once it has been manually resized there is no way to take it back to auto-resizing mode.
Form field annotations allow the creation of interactive PDF forms which consist of a collection of fields for gathering information interactively from the user. PDF documents may contain an arbitrary number of fields appearing on any combination of pages, all of which together make up a single interactive form spanning the entire document.
Field names: Field names are used to allow multiple form field annotation objects to be independent of each other: form fields with the same field name always have the same text associated with that field name. When text is entered into one of the objects, the text associated with that field name is changed in all objects. To ensure unique text for a form field, you must give it a unique field name.
Form fields can have a maximum number of characters allowed in the field. By default form fields are set a Maximum Length value of 0, which indicates there is no limit. Any positive value will be used as the upper limit of allowable number of characters in the field.
It is possible to specify the font and font size and text alignment individually for each form field.
When a form field is being edited, the tab key will tab to the next field in the form. The tab order between form fields can be controlled by dragging any field’s yellow sequence number to another field. This will swap the order of those two fields. The Clear All Form Fields menu item under the Dynamic Annotations menu is useful to clear any and all text currently in form fields in the document, prior to exporting the document to PDF.
Button annotations are check boxes, radio buttons and regular buttons. Buttons can have actions atached to them. Actions are most appropriate for regular buttons. They are executed when the button is clicked (e.g. go to "next page", or "print").
Radio buttons and check boxes have a Selected Value. For radio buttons to work correctly as a group, they need to have the same field name, but a unique Selected Value. This will ensure only a single radio button can be selected within a group.
Note annotations put a small icon on the page, that, when clicked, pops up an inspector where you can read and edit the text of the note, and alter its icon. There are different types of note annotations whose only practical difference is the type of icon used for the popup button: Comment, Key, Note, Help, New Paragraph, Paragraph, Insert. The popover can be dismissed by clicking outside it, on the page.
Link annotations create hyper-links to other parts of the same document, to pages in other PDF documents, to web addresses, email accounts or to other files on your system.
You can create link annotations by issuing the a command from the menus, or popup menu, and dragging a selection on the page over the content that you want linked. If the content contains text, the link will be made to fit the text neatly. You can also select some text first and then issue one of the link creation commands. Once the link is created you can set its destination in the inspector, by double clicking the annotation.
If you select some text containing a web link or an email address and then create default link (command-option-L), then PDF Nomad will try to extract the link and use it as the link target, so that you don't have to type it in manually.
PDF Nomad has provisions for automatically linking cross document references to their targets (like the link in the screenshot above).
You can add graphics annotations to PDF pages by pasting them, or by dragging them from the Finder directly onto the target page.
The annotation inspector is shown by double clicking an annotation while in Edit Annotation mode. The contents of the inspector vary depending on the type of annotation that was clicked. (Note annotations additionally show the contents inspector when single clicked in the default text mode. They show the general inspector when in annotation mode.)