Today I\u2019m plugging one of my favorite applications, one that I\u2019ve found to be indispensible both in my work as a researcher and my day-to-day life as a seasoned grad student:\u00a0 Adobe Acrobat Pro.<\/p>\n
Most everyone is familiar with Adobe Acrobat<\/a>,\u00a0the free, gold-standard tool for reading pdfs. \u00a0Well, the Pro version<\/a> is the superstar older sibling of Acrobat.\u00a0 You can use it not only to read pdfs, but also to:<\/p>\n The main thing that I use Adobe Acrobat Pro for is the third point above \u2013 marking up and annotating texts.\u00a0 In fact, Adobe Acrobat Pro has (for me at least) revolutionized the process of how I interact with texts.\u00a0 Let me explain.<\/p>\n In the old days I\u2019d build up massive collections of books and articles for my research \u2013 enough to fill a small library.\u00a0 Each one of those books and articles would be covered in my handwritten jottings, highlights, sticky notes, and flags.\u00a0 To retrieve those notes (and the thoughts that went along with them) I\u2019d have to revisit each one of those texts, flip through it, decipher the jottings, and then do something with them.\u00a0 Traveling was a hassle because it meant the agony of choosing the most necessary texts and then schlepping them around with me.<\/p>\n Not anymore.<\/p>\n These days I have everything I can get my hands on in electronic format.\u00a0 I can carry thousands of texts around with me, safely contained in the hard drive of my laptop or in a virtual safe deposit box in the cloud<\/a>. \u00a0Using Adobe Acrobat Pro I can easily mark up those texts electronically with all the virtual highlights, sticky notes, flags, scribbles, and jottings that my heart desires.\u00a0 All of these are also easy to modify and even delete.\u00a0 Remember flipping through your old library books and diligently erasing all your pencil marks?\u00a0 Remember your dissatisfaction in knowing that you could never remove that ugly highlighting?\u00a0 With electronic texts these little problems simply don’t exist.<\/p>\n The other thing that\u2019s so useful is that all of the typed comments I insert into a pdf can easily be copied and then pasted into other documents and programs.\u00a0 For example, I sometimes start composing parts of my own writing into the texts that I\u2019m reading.\u00a0 With a few clicks I can lift my compositions out and paste them into Word.\u00a0 When I\u2019m jotting things down about the text itself, I lift and deposit those into Endnote, where I store all the bibliographic information for each book and article that I read.\u00a0 (Note to grad students \u2013 this is extremely useful in preparing for your general exams, as well as preparing your literature reviews.)<\/p>\n\n