Math annotations in a PDF file

Question

I like to comment on articles that I read digitally. There are numerous programs in this process. For example, in OS X you can use programs such as Skim or even Preview. However, creating annotations is terrible if you want to add mathematical annotations, such as formulas or Greek letters. A cumbersome “solution” is to select the desired character one by one using the Special Characters panel, although this significantly slows down the annotation process.

Is there a way to add math annotations to a PDF? The only two restrictions that I would impose on the solution are that 1) the mathematical text must be selected, i.e. It should be textual, and 2) I want to limit the number of programs that I need to make the process as painless as possible.

Some of the more promising solutions I've tried include creating LaTeX with LaTeXiT, but it seems impossible to add PDF on top of another PDF. Another attempt was to use jsMath to generate characters and copy them as annotations using one of the jsMath fonts. This results in unreadable invalid characters.

Answer 1

Low-level solution: import the PDF into a LaTeX document and place notes with the exact location ( full example here ) or use the pdfcomment package, which automatically places comments ( full example here ). Both methods support LaTeX math code.

High level solution: if you're fine with editing one pdf page at a time, then import the pdf page into Inkscape and annotate with LaTeX using TexText .

Answer 2

You can paste one PDF on top of another in Context using layers. I talked a little about how to do this in my answer to the question of how to insert the source PDF file into an existing page in qn PDF format