PDFExpert is my preferred PDF viewer on the Mac. It’s far from perfect, but has features that I’ve come to rely on; it’s better at re-organizing pages than anything else I’ve used, has some nice PDF editing capabilities, and has earned its spot as my default PDF app. It’s more feature-ful than Preview, and saves me from having the bloat of Acrobat on my Mac.¹

I don’t do much with annotations in general in PDFs, but I recently received a massive document from the people who designed our new auditorium’s A/V system. It was over 1600 pages long, and all the manuals for every piece of equipment in a single file with annotations referencing the relevant equipment in the header. It didn’t have a table of ocntents, and was the first step in getting an actual listing out of everything in this A/V package, so I went through it with PDFExpert and tagged everything in the PDF “outline”² (which renders as a table of contents in Preview).

I was warned, however, that this wasn’t the “final” version of this document and there’d be a few additions. I don’t have a tool for diff-ing PDFs (I’m aware of Kaleidoscope, but can’t justify it for my limited use), so while I wanted to be able to reference these contents now, I was afraid I’d have to do this work all over again.

Here’s where the “export annotation summary” feature of PDFExpert comes in. I exported it all as Markdown (it supports text and HTML as well) and opened it up in BBEdit. From there, I could easily see every annotation, and can then go back and use BBEdit’s diff feature with the new document when I get it. From there, the sane thing will probably be to just move the new pages into my existing PDF and add them to the table of contents.

I’ve been using PDFExpert for several years now, and never had to use this feature, but I appreciate reading how other people handle unique problems with odd solutions, so I figured I’d share my own experience here.