View comments more compactly

[surgubben]

PDF X-change Editor plus 9.2 build 359.0

Menu File - Preferences - Commenting
"Comments Viewing Options"

All the items "Display *" are great, but I request one more.
Display comment in compact form (or whatever)
This should then remove the comment popup header so that only the comment text with a thin border is shown. The benefit is that popups can be position so that it doesn't cover any text (at least sometimes).

[Tracker Supp-Stefan]

Hello surgubben,

Comment popups will not scale (as per the PDF specification), so if you need to make a note in a file that will stay and scale with the rest of the content - then please consider using e.g. the text box tool for placing annotations that will scale.

You can hide information from the pop-up's toolbar:

But this does not make it smaller.

Or you can use the "Inser/Replace" text markup tools - and those will only show the tooltip when hovered over:

image1.png (18.5 KiB) Viewed 1175 times

Kind regards,
Stefan

[surgubben]

I'm not sure about what you mean with PDF specification. The comments are just added on top of the document. The presentation of the tooltip is all PDF-Xchange proprietary. It's very flexible with size, position color and all kinds of customization. PDF-Xchange developers could add the compact tooltip window which does not have any dependency on the PDF specification.
Hovering would is ok for the (few) times where a lot of text would be needed.
My request is just for short one sentence (or just a few words) where the reader needs to see the whole page including the comments at once.
For instance, think of a teacher grading some paper. Inserted words would look just as if you typed them on the paper with a red marker.

Please send to the developers. This is a low hanging fruit

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hello, surgubben

I think you may be misunderstanding how restrictive the PDF specification is. only specific details can be stored within the document, that is the bottom line of the PDF specification.
If we ignore that, and store "extra" information about comments (or any content type for that matter), that is not part of the Spec, it could confuse other PDF applications, causing them to damage, incorrectly modify, or delete the content, or possibly even other document information. Breaking the spec often leads to issue that result in data loss or irreversible file corruption, even for things as seemingly inconsequential as "having more than one leader on a callout comment" or modifying the container of a comment to display in a special way in our software would be those kinds of modifications. You are correct that we could make it a purely viewing change within our software, but that would also have unforeseen consequences.

These comment pop-outs record their relative position from the comment in question, and the overall size of their container

This way, we can open them in any software, and the comment container will be the same size, see above comparing us (left) to adobe (right), the pop-outs are the same size because they were saved as such. Now, if we allowed out software to make the pop out only a single line in height, what would happen if you open it in adobe, which uses 2-3 lines of space for the title? You wouldnt even see enough to reach a scrollbar to read the comment content at all.

We have to account for the display functions of our competitors, while also adhering to the Specification, as such, I am afraid that this request will be rejected.

As stefan mentioned, if you just need a permanently visible comment that is a single line in size, instead of using the pop-outs, you should use the "text-box" tool for that purpose, as it can do exactly what you are asking for, without breaking the specification:

image.png (17.49 KiB) Viewed 1167 times

Kind regards,

[surgubben]

Hi Daniel,
Thank you for your comprehensive reply!
I'm not asking for any change to the PDF specification. The specification only allows for adding text. How the viewer presents this is up to each PDF viewer. However, the PDFX-Change already have 3 checkboxes the user can choose from in Preferences - Commenting
Display Subject label in comment pop-ups
Display Author label in comment pop-ups and tooltips
Display Modification Date in comment pop-ups

These are PDFX-Change proprietary and is not stored in the PDF document.

I'm asking for a fourth checkbox
Display compact comment pop-ups and tooltips

My request is only to make a smaller popup window which would help review process in documents with dense text. I don't see any use cases where the compact mode would risk making a visual mess. Default mode should of course be disabled so that nobody would see the comment pop-ups differently from what they're used to. But reviewers would be happy about the compact mode since often all comments come from the same person but still each comment is bloated (with tooltip window and possibly Author and date).

The text box feature should not be used for review. The review process allows you to jump to next comment which is very efficient. In a normal review process the document editor can evaluate each comment, fix or ignore, and then delete the comment.
Text boxes are nice for special text that should be placed in a specific position but is a permanent part of a document.
After a review session all comments are deleted in the released document.

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hello, surgubben

Understood, I cannot promise a change will be coming here, but I can at least say we will take a look and consider it.

Also regarding this next bit, I have one correction.

Text boxes are nice for special text that should be placed in a specific position but is a permanent part of a document.
After a review session all comments are deleted in the released document.

Text boxes are a type of comment, exactly like the highlighter, typewriter, callout, and sticky note tool. They display the content on the page, but they are simply comments, not "base content (a permanent part of the page), if you use a function to remove all comments, textboxes would be included in that removal function.

Kind regards,

[surgubben]

Hi

I noticed to my delight in version 10.2.1 that the menu "File - Preferences - Commenting" now has additional fields.

2024-02-23-PDFChange-File-Preferences-Commenting.png (68.44 KiB) Viewed 172 times

The second choice looks promising "Display compact comment pop-ups"

But I have not found out how it works or where it is documented.

I hope it is a feature that Review Comments are possible to presented with only text and not top bar in the rectangular line around the comment.

[TrackerSupp-Daniel]

Hello, surgubben

It is a very simple option, you can see what it does simply by enabling or disabling it while a comment popup is visible:

Note that the above option is for the "page items" while the option of similar name in the comments pane, specifically pertains to the contents there:

Kind regards,