PDF/Word index highlights

[hughlle]

Hi all. First time poster, don't bite. I didn't see a general software section so posted here, move if required.

I'll start off by saying i am not a fan of ipads, i've always been someone who likes fiddling with things, often breaking them, and android just works for me, however i bought an ipad air 2 just to give it a chance and it just didn't work for me. The hardware was truly fantastic, leaps and bounds above and beyond my nexus 10, other than it not having stereo front facing speakers, but the software wasn't my cup of tea (which was annoying, to be honest, it was a pretty sleek device)

So while i enjoy tinkering, i have little experience with the more mundane things like office etc.

Anyway, I decided to give it to my mother for christmas, she decided she didn't have a use for it, so now my father is looking at how useful it could be. His work involves LARGE legal documents, and he needs to highlight a lot. He asked me whether i knew of any program for ipad that has the ability to highlight text, and then essentially create a post it note for that page, an annotated tab, as you might with a ring binder of documents. Ideally these tabs could be searchable. unfortunately i barely know office aplications on windows, let alone mobile variants, let alone mobile variants on ios.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[twerppoet]

What format are the documents in?

PDF's, I'd recommend he check out PDF Expert. You can't exactly create post it notes, but your highlights are viewable via an index column, similar to a table of contents. You can also export the file via email, with a summary of the highlights and other annotations in the email's body.

There might be better tools for this, but this is the one I have that comes closest to what you've described.

For Office documents he should probably use the Microsoft Word app for iOS. While not as full featured as the desktop version, it has most of the common features, including the collaboration ones. More importantly the documents are compatible with other Microsoft Office apps, so what you can't do on the iPad you can export to a computer and finish.

I'm not overly familiar with Word for iOS. It requires a paid Office 365 subscription to unlock all the features, but most will work with a free account.


Here's how PDF Expert by Readdle looks when viewing annotations in the app, and how the export email with an annotation summary looks. PDF's exported to other PDF readers should retain the more common annotations, like highlights, but might drop others. Unfortunately not all PDF apps support all annotations, or in exactly the same way.