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The study of technical reports or complex arguments (like relativity) often requires the printing
of electronic documents, on which you're working, to underline or highlight some elements. The most
famous format of such documents is the Adobe pdf, made by the californian society that also gives an application
for their reading (freeware) and modification (not free). There are a lot of Readers that render Pdf files,
and certainly one of the best is SumatraPDF developed by K. Kowalczyk e downloaded from his blog.
SumatraPDF is a little dimension viewer, is portable (you can save it on your usb-key), but above all is open-source.
Unfortunately - being a reader - its task isn't to annotate documents, although some users asked this change
for future version.
Although I don't know any PDF specifications, I decided to download the sources and to implement some sort of mechanism which allows to underline and annotate the pdf documents: the result is ePdf. You can download the application from this link [ePdf.zip], and the sources from this [ePdf sources]. For a correct functionality of the application you must integrate ePDF sources with SumatraPDF files. In the remaining page I shortly describes the procedures followed: As a guideline for ePDF development I decided to mantain the SumatraPDF features; so I didn't want to save annotations directly in pdf format - as a correct application should do - because for this particularly difficult step I should implement a procedure to create pdf from the structure read by SumatraPDF (muPDF). Besides the annotation activity (consider the schematic structures of an argumentation made by notes and connectors) demands an area greater than that provided by pdf page (often A4). So I decided to save underlines, highlights and notes in an external file which is loaded directly by user once correct document is openend. Moreover my purpose was to compact the SumatraPDF modifications in few points and so I developed CPdfNotes class that contains ePDF functionalties. The User Graphical Interface is the same of SumatraPDF: the annotation module - that I called pdfNotes and that represents CPdfNotes class - is loaded and used only with mouse buttons. There are no toolbars, windows or menus in ePDF frame that contains pdfNotes commands; they are showed with right mouse button. The features are: a. Underlines b. Highlights c. Notes d. Free connectors or among notes Underlines and Highlights are linked to pdf page and they are deleted if you try to draw them outside it. Instead you can insert notes and connectors in each position you want. It is possible to modify notes font and color and also color for underlines and connectors; this feature is not allowed for highlights. Is not given the printing functionality of annotations.
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