Add comments and markup PDFs with style

How to annotate a PDF is a question whose answer will depend on the needs of your current project. However, to ensure a frictionless PDF markup workflow, including when commenting on a PDF, most of what you need can be quickly accessed in a single right-click.

Just because Adobe Acrobat is the industry standard doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best thing you can use to comment on PDFs. Its long list of features, while impressive, often ends up confusing new users, and it’s also not priced as accessibly as other alternatives. It’s also a cloud-based service, meaning that your work efficiency will depend on your internet connection and Adobe’s servers.

In contrast, PDF Extra has all the essential tools that you’ll need to perform any PDF markup job. It’s also a competitively priced Adobe Acrobat alternative coming up at just $49.99 per year for the Premium subscription. You can even work offline or purchase a permanent license in case you don’t want to pay for a yearly subscription.

Yes! PDF Extra offers most markup tools free of charge, allowing you to do about 80% of the work without paying anything. Some useful features, however, such as adding attachments or removing PDF markups, as well as tools like PDF compression, PDF conversion, or PDF combiner, are not available in the free PDF annotator and require a license.

As with any text-based content, simply right-click an image to reveal a list of all available quick markup options. For a bit more complex tasks, such as placing a stamp or drawing on top of an image, use PDF Extra's dedicated comment & markup section tools.

PDF Extra allows you to delete markups in a single click, saving you hours on end spent looking for specific comments or any highlighted texts you might have missed. Please note that by erasing all annotations, you will also erase comments left by previous users.

The contents of a PDF, such as text, images, or annotations, are all stored as separate parts, called layers. When flattening a PDF with PDF Extra, you create a single-layered version of your document that treats all of its content elements as native text, while preserving your original multi-layered document intact.

One of the main reasons you should flatten a PDF is when you want comments and other annotations to appear in printed form. Another reason is when you want to lock certain interactive elements within a PDF, such as checkboxes, radio buttons, and drop-down lists. Flattening your document will make any such elements impossible for others to edit. You can also password-protect PDFs as an extra security measure.

When flattening a PDF, any images you may have in your document will get converted to JPEG, which may sometimes affect the final quality. In case you want to make your file smaller and keep the quality as close to the original as possible, a much better option is to use PDF compression.

Since annotations are superimposed on top of the PDF (meaning that they are added as an extra layer), they are not “seen” by the printer and are therefore not visible on paper. When you flatten comments in a PDF, you will merge all elements into a single document layer that the printer will then see and understand.