Highlighting Question

[alrumich]

Originally Posted by Johnny Cakes

I purchased the PRS700 due to its highlighting features which I obviously did not understand. I was taken with the PRS700's ability to highlight by just tapping the screen, but the inability to print out the highlights or even have them displayed in full form is a non-starter. My bad.

I am using this with court transcripts. I need to highlight a key phrase or two from every page and create a digest.

Could a tablet do what I need? Suggestions?

You can do it on any PC with Adobe Professional (not a very cheap solution though), which has an option to automatically copy the highlighted text into the comment; when you are done you can print your comments into a separate file (and then copy-paste it into a text editor if you need to change smth).

If anyone is aware of better options, I am all ears.

[Johnny Cakes]

I'm willing to throw some money at this, if it would work. This is basically the main part of my job.

Just to make sure I understand what you are saying: if I had a tablet PC, and Adobe Professional, I could use a stylus to begin/end highlighting (like the PRS-700) as I page through a document and the highlighted text would be automatically copied to comment. And no limit as to the length, size, and number of comments? Does the comment indicate what page the text came from?

Thanks for trying to help me!

[alrumich]

Originally Posted by Johnny Cakes

I'm willing to throw some money at this, if it would work. This is basically the main part of my job.

Just to make sure I understand what you are saying: if I had a tablet PC, and Adobe Professional, I could use a stylus to begin/end highlighting (like the PRS-700) as I page through a document and the highlighted text would be automatically copied to comment. And no limit as to the length, size, and number of comments? Does the comment indicate what page the text came from?

Thanks for trying to help me!

Yes. Exactly like that. I am using this scheme for about 3 years. I am not sure about limit on length though, but you can always make two comments instead of one. As to page indication, it does indicate to which page it refers (it does something like page number, comment number; but reference will be to the page of a PDF, which is not necessarily the page number of a document).

[alrumich]

Originally Posted by thibaulthalpern

Yes. The best way to understand something we read and to retain information is to interact with the text rather than just passively move eye from line to line to line. You can do the latter when reading for leisure but it's not a very skillful way of reading when you need to retain information and/or when you are working out the meanings and contradictions of an argument.

When reading an article (or book) for example, it's helpful to mark areas of the book where the main arguments appears, where you have doubts about something being explained, where a piece of information is useful for your study (or in my case, research, since I'm a scholar). It's also helpful to mark areas where you don't understand but think is important but in the interest of getting the larger picture you will return to that difficult passage later.

These are all ways of interacting with the text that move us beyond just eye glossing from line to line to line. Do the companies or people who create these digital technologies understand this at all? This is really rather basic and fundamental reading skills!

Excellent point. I am a doctoral student, so I understand exactly what you mean. The best option which works very well for me is a Tablet PC (or UMPC) + Acrobat PRO + Endnote. Acrobat is ridiculously expensive, so there are other cheaper options, like Nitro and Foxit Readers; their only drawback, compared to Acrobat, is that they do not have OCR (Optical Character Recognition) option, which creates an extra layer beneath the scanned picture with the actual text, which can be highlighted, search and commented. But, there must be university computers with Acrobat PRO, so you can just OCR your files there (this needs to be done only once). OCR is not perfect, but so far it's been working perfectly fine for my purposes.

Let me know if anything above stated needs elaboration.