How To Annotate a PDF on a Mac and iPhone

If you want to boost the speed at which you learn and the ability to remember what you read, then knowing how to annotate digital documents is helpful. It’s also a useful skill for providing feedback and making notes on changes you want to a PDF in the future. If you’re looking for an intuitive solution, PDF Expert makes annotating documents extremely easy on Mac and iPhone. So, as a student or a working professional, you can edit such documents easily. Below, we will go through the different ways you can annotate a PDF so that you aren’t wasting time trying to figure out how it all works. 

How To Highlight a PDF on Mac

Being able to highlight a PDF is very useful for making important points stand out at a glance. It allows you to return to the document later and quickly pick up where you left off. To organize your thoughts further, you can color-code the notes you have made so that they are a lot easier to navigate. An excellent example is using orange for book titles and names and blue for important ideas, allowing you to find exactly what you are looking for without wasting valuable time. 

To do this, you first need to download PDF Expert for free from the App Store. Then, you only need to highlight the text you wish to annotate on the PDF and click on the “Annotate” option in the toolbar. You will be given three options: “Strikeout,” “Underline,” and “Highlight.” Choose the formatting you want to use, and then simply select the text you want to annotate. The sidebar on the right of your screen will allow you to change the color of the annotated text; if you want to, right-click and choose another color. PDF Expert is great because you can edit PDF on iPhone instead of just using your MacBook. Now, you can make changes to your PDFs from wherever you are!

How To Add Notes to a PDF

If you are reading through a document on your MacBook and want to add some notes to the text, then you can use the sticky notes tool from PDF Expert. This will allow you to write down any ideas that come to you as you are reading the PDF. Sticky notes are also useful for summarizing the key points from a long text block, allowing you to structure your thoughts.

To do this, you need to open the file using PDF Expert and navigate to the “Annotate” option again. This time, click “Note” and select where to add the sticky note to the document. Then, all you need to do is type any comment you want to make and, finally, click anywhere on the PDF. This final step will save the note you have made. There is also a shortcut method to add notes quickly, which can be done by simply right-clicking wherever you want to add the note and selecting the “Note” option. 

How To Draw in a PDF

PDF Expert allows you to draw on a PDF, allowing you to make personalized edits. You can use these features to sketch or draw anything from sophisticated graphs to simple shapes and even mind maps. To do this, once you have opened the PDF document in the PDF Expert App, click on the “Annotate” option and navigate to the “Pen” tool. You can change the pen tool’s thickness, opacity, and color using the sidebar on the right-hand side of the screen.

You can then use the pen tool to draw or sketch anything you want directly onto the PDF, and if you want to remove any edits you have made, you can use the “Eraser” tool to wipe it out. This feature is fantastic when you want to make quick comments to a document highlighting important information you want to remember now and revisit later. 

How To Download Annotations from a PDF

Once you have made all of the annotations to a PDF, keeping them in a separate file you can access whenever you want is a good idea. This will allow you to keep a copy of the PDF with all the notes you have added, as well as an unedited copy. To do this, click “File” in the top-left of the screen, then click on the “Export Annotation Summary” option and select the format in which you wish to save the file. After you have done this, simply click save, and you will have a copy of all the annotations you have made that can be accessed easily. Remember, you can do this on your phone, too!

Final Thoughts

PDFs are versatile documents, and so many of us use them professionally and personally. Making annotations to a PDF is a novel way to organize your thoughts, make useful notes about important elements of a document, and mark spots for future edits that need to be made. PDF Expert has everything you need to make edits effortlessly, so why not try it out?