Technical Writing Tip: Reviewing Comments in Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat allows users to mark up documents using their Comment feature – something we use often here at ASCENT when reviewing our books. I’ve talked about marking up documents in Adobe before, so today I’m going to discuss some tips for reviewing those comments if you’re on the receiving end. 

Use the Comments pane  

Though you can see any markups within the document, sometimes they are easily missed, especially if they are small or you have a lot of comments in a single document. For this reason, I like to review comments using the list in the Comments pane. Click the Comment icon on the right side of the page (as shown below) or select View>Tools>Comment>Open to open the pane. 

Check off comments as you review them 

I like to keep track of which comments I’ve reviewed by checking the Add Checkmark checkbox within each comment box, as shown below. This helps to ensure you don’t miss anything when reviewing. It also gives you another option for filtering comments (more on that next). 

Filter the comments 

Working with documents that contain hundreds of pages can be daunting, especially if faced with dozens (or hundreds!) of comments to review. If you add checkmarks to each comment as you address it, you can then filter out the checked comments, so you only have the unchecked comments in the list. There are other ways you can filter the comments (by author, by type) and they can also be sorted alphabetically, but the Checked/Unchecked filter is the one I use the most. To apply this filter, click the Filter icon at the top of the Comments pane and select Unchecked. 

One thing to keep in mind is that if there are replies to any of the comments, you will need to add a checkmark to ALL the comments in the thread for the thread to be filtered out as “checked”. 

Output a comment summary 

In Adobe Acrobat, you can also output a separate comment summary. This may be helpful if you are dealing with a large document and want to create a smaller file that could be sent by email for someone to review or if you want to keep a separate record of the comments. Important to note, however, is that the comment summary is a static document, so you won’t be able to add checkmarks to comments or use the filter tools with this option.  

To create a comment summary, select the … button at the top of the Comments pane and select Create Comment Summary…, as shown below. 

This opens the Create Comment Summary dialog box, where you can choose the settings for your comment summary. If your goal is to decrease your file size, be sure to uncheck the Pages containing no comments option (as shown below) to only output pages that contain comments. 

The output of your comment summary will vary depending on your selections in the dialog box, but an example is shown below, with the marked-up document page on the left and the comment(s) listed on the right. 

I hope you find these tips useful when reviewing comments in your PDFs!