I want to read uni notes, easily annotate and organise on my netbook...

[quixotic]

Hi,

I am a university student in Australia and am seeking advice on software. I have recently bought a Acer Aspire netbook for the purpose of:
1. reading pdf university notes and taking relevant notes in the lecture.
2. reading economics books of personal interest and taking notes, highlighting passages, making bookmarks etc.

Currently I will have notes/books in a pdf and in a word document my notes. This is a slow, awkard way of making notes and absorbing material, more time is spent fiddling than thinking, annotating and absorbing. Most of my sources are pdf, the ones that aren't are creative commons epub books.


I tried to use adobe's digital editions today and whilst it is a neat piece of software when you have a few pdf loaded in once a semester at university has finished I can expect to have well over 100 sets of lecture notes in addition to notes for other contact hour and studying. With so many documents I feel it will be too hard to organise texts in any more depth than bookshelves, there is no ability to tag documents or organise them in subfolders apparent.

Also whilst I can make bookmarks I cannot seem to make highlighted text nor annotations that actually appear on the document. Finally I am concerned that any bookmarks/annotations I can make will only be legible when read via the reader, if I choose to view or print the original pdf the notes won't be there.




So in summary I am looking for a ebook reader or other software that satisfies my requirements for bookmarks, annotations, highlighting, sufficient organising and ability to save the bookmarks/annotations/highlighting I make and of course have the bookmarks/annotations/highlighting appear when printed.

Does Adobe Reader offer this ability? I notice I can highlight and make speech bubbles but when I print the notes surely the speech bubbles won't show up.

[CWatkinsNash]

Originally Posted by quixotic

Does Adobe Reader offer this ability? I notice I can highlight and make speech bubbles but when I print the notes surely the speech bubbles won't show up.

Have you tried it? I don't have Adobe Reader anymore, but I use Foxit Reader, and it prints out my annotations, highlights, and so on.

It sounds like you need two separate things - a viewer (such as Foxit or Adobe) and a document management application. You can use calibre to organize them, or you can look into document management software. There are several of those out there, some of which are free. Many of them are a pain to initially set up because they are designed for complex office document management systems, but some are less complicated.

So my recommendation would be either calibre or googling "document management software".

[susan_cassidy]

There is no reason why you can't put pdf documents in different folders yourself, perhaps grouped by subject matter, or whatever. A PDF should open with Adobe Reader no matter what folder it is in, when you click on it.

[Billi]

Maybe you can have a look at Citavi to organise your documents:

http://www.citavi.de/en/index.html

It has a free version for projects up to 100 books/documents.

[quixotic]

Originally Posted by CWatkinsNash

Have you tried it? I don't have Adobe Reader anymore, but I use Foxit Reader, and it prints out my annotations, highlights, and so on.

It sounds like you need two separate things - a viewer (such as Foxit or Adobe) and a document management application. You can use calibre to organize them, or you can look into document management software. There are several of those out there, some of which are free. Many of them are a pain to initially set up because they are designed for complex office document management systems, but some are less complicated.

So my recommendation would be either calibre or googling "document management software".

I downloaded Foxit Reader and it seems to be a nice piece of software, good to know it will print the annotations and I think it uses less resources on the netbook so it is quicker.

Originally Posted by Billi

Maybe you can have a look at Citavi to organise your documents:

http://www.citavi.de/en/index.html

It has a free version for projects up to 100 books/documents.

I'll try that one out.

Originally Posted by susan_cassidy

There is no reason why you can't put pdf documents in different folders yourself, perhaps grouped by subject matter, or whatever. A PDF should open with Adobe Reader no matter what folder it is in, when you click on it.

I've been doing that at the moment but I am just a little concerned that once I have another 2-3 years of study behind me even this method might be a little awkward as I will have well over 1000 documents for university alone.



Thanks all for the advice , I'll be sure to give an update on how foxit works after some more time and how well citavi works.