My Wish List for Notes - Across the Suite

I am a huge fan of PDF Commenting. I love notes for a variety of reasons:

• For collaboration with editors
• To help me quickly locate non-searchable text (scanned text, or text in images)
• To give instructions to printers
• To keep myself organized
• For color coding systems and different types of information
• PDF commenting forces others to organizes their thoughts into something cohesive right on the page (as opposed to emailing general gibberish)

This article is a follow-up to one of my previous articles: My Wish List for Notes in Adobe InDesign.

InDesign

• I wish that like in Photoshop or Acrobat, a note could reside independent of a text flow.
• I wish that I could natively apply notes to objects and they would appear in the Notes panel. (Notes can be applied to objects via the ObjectNotes script, but they can only be navigated to using the NoteNavigator Script.)
• I wish that notes from InDesign could export to PDF automatically, to either Print PDF or Interactive PDF. (You can include InDesign Notes when exporting to PDF using PDF Stickies.)
• I wish that I could choose different note colors and icons, right within InDesign.
• I wish that my username and date would appear as the author of the note within Acrobat (just as they already do for InCopy.)
• I wish I could automatically import notes back into my InDesign document, from the corresponding Acrobat document. (This functionality is available using DTP Tools Annotations.) I also want the replies to come along with it.
• I wish that I could import text highlights into InDesign, as non-printing objects, sort of like invisible characters, that they would only appear in Normal Mode, and not in Preview mode. (This functionality is available using DTP Tools Annotations.)

Many of my ideas for InDesign notes can be incorporated right into the existing Notes panel.

Photoshop

• I wish that I could specify my username, and choose icons, colors, etc.
• I wish that drawing markups would import.
• 6-2-17: I wish that Photoshop would change how it handles notes. Formerly, it imported them, now it says they will be ignored, but in certain circumstance, it actually DELETES them!

Illustrator

• I wish that Illustrator could make notes. Or read notes. Or do anything at all with notes.

In Acrobat

• I wish that that when I have along list of comments, that the scroll wheel would scroll down through the list, but I have to instead use the scroll bar to scroll down.
• I wish that Sort Comments by Color would be restored as a feature (it was removed in Acrobat X). This was added to Acrobat DC in 2016!

• I wish for the return of the amazing comment toolbar in Acrobat 9. While I can undock the Comments Pane in Acrobat XI, all the handy tools are missing and I cannot dock the Comments pane to the bottom of my document. 

The Acrobat 9 Comments Pane has lots of many tools

The Acrobat XI Comments Pane (even when undocked) has just a couple difficult-to-use sorting methods, and is missing all the handy tools

Is there anything you would like to see in commenting throughout the suite? Leave your comments below.

Like this article? You may also be interested in: My Wish List for Notes in Adobe InDesign.

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If you need an easier way to create and manage annotations in your PDFs, check out my article on Bluebeam Revu. It's an amazing program designed specifically to meet the needs of users in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction. Specifically, read about the Toolchest, where you can store annotations that you use frequently. Revu has done an amazing job of listening to their users and building a tool to meet their needs.