iAnnotate – Handwriting Tool – can choose from a spectrum of colours, adjust opacity & brush sizes. You can also change & save the colour, brush size and opacity.
PDF Expert – Preset pens at the top very practical. Has various useful adjustments you can make your handwritten or drawn notes/diagrams.ġ2. GoodReader handwriting toolbar – clean and simple. Palm rest included also (grey bar on bottom). Goodreader Zoom in tool – Magnifies where you want to write & allows you to write as per usual. Note annotation (“eg counter offer is offeree…”) in blue is missing.ġ0. iAnnotate – Font option overwhelms top right corner. Goodreader – Adding text is a major turn off! Text window takes up half the screen (usually the important half), and there is only 1 font!ĩ. Callout, fill, border & cloudy options are unique Goodreader.Ĩ. Goodreader – a variety of text editing options to choose from. The whole text edit option here is simple and neat.ħ. PDF Expert – Search is similar to iAnnotate but is a popup menu, & annotated terms are also searched. Search is off to the side, but bulky highlighted term is a turn off. iAnnotate – Syncing & executing other tasks is possible. PDF Expert Thumb view & Drag n Drop are new in v4 (already available in iAnnotate, however) – but it makes organising/moving files easier.ĥ. Its clean look with options to move/email/zip files are a lot easier on the eyes.Ĥ. PDF Expert – Syncing (bottom left) & organising files in concert is possible. Backgound middle right in grey gives options to move/rename/email/zip files.ģ. GoodReader – You can’t view/browse files whilst syncing is in progress. Note: You can’t rename/move files that are synced to servers.Ģ. You can drag & drop files to delete etc (as shown). iAnnotate – Interface to move/rename/email files. (I often have GoodReader and GoodNotes open as 'adjacent' apps so that I can flip between reading a PDF and writing my ideas.1. I find the overlay type fits better with my reading (but I am a mathematician), but GoodReader has various other benefits that make it the better choice for reading PDFs for me. GoodReader does 'proper' highlighting whilst the other two do the 'overlay' type (GoodReader can do overlayed highlighting if you choose the pen correctly). I use GoodReader, iAnnotate, and GoodNotes and like them all. This means that it is much more like a real highlighter pen on paper and so you can highlight absolutely anything on the page. Main characteristics: it is not constrained to follow the text and it goes over the text. The latter is a definite advantage, but the former can be irritating: if you have, for example, maths where the characters go above and below the line then the highlighting goes up and down as well. Main characteristics: it follows the text precisely and it goes under the text. If you draw with slightly transparent ink then you can create the effect of a highlighter pen. They consider the PDF as a background and then draw on top of it. Other apps, such as iAnnotate and GoodNotes, work in a slightly different way. The PDF specification allows for highlighted text and some apps, such as GoodReader, do their highlighting by taking advantage of this. It depends slightly on what you mean by 'highlighting text'. 927 4 4 gold badges 13 13 silver badges 20 20 bronze badges 4 Answers