Format a comment summary?

[roberth31409345]

Issues related to this are all over the web, and the forums, but I'm not seeing this specific question addressed.

I cannot be the only person who would like comment reports (also annotation, etc. reports) to be formatted very differently, and conceivably different for different purposes.

We/I tend to work with very long documents (manuscripts).  In writing a review or detailed commentary for the author(s) and editor(s), it is useful to be able to generate a comment report so that a) I don't have to worry about missing a note somewhere and b) retype my (sometimes very detailed) comment from scratch if I decide to pass it along.

At present, I have to generate the report, copy the text to the clipboard and paste it into Word.  Then by hand I adjust the information in each note as needed edit it, and format it appropriately.

I would *really* like to streamline this process a little in generating the report from inside Acrobat.

• I'd really like it to be one continuous list instead of separated onto different pages.  Not an issue when you paste it into Word, but on the off chance my notes are detailed enough I'd like to just send the report on
• I'd like to change the formatting within the report so that (for instance)
  • the date/time can be excluded, or formatted differently (or for that matter the author, especially if there's only one)
  • the page heading, author/date information, etc. were smaller and
  • the comment contents were bigger (since the content of the comment is usually much more important than who made it or when)
  •   and really, to make life easier downstream, to include a line number or something to make it easier to find on the page exaclty what is being commented on

Really making these changes just pasting the text into Word is a serious pain, since nothing is formatted or styled so changes can be made at once.

I've worked with JavaScripts that can do some of this, but I'm not scripter enough to really understand how they work and edit them so they output what I want to output.

And it seems to me that something so basic as the *look* of a report, especially re: font sizes and so on, should be settable as preferences inside Acrobat

So that's my rant.  Any thoughts?

[Document Geek]

Agreed 100%. I also think it would be nice to not have some much space dedicated the The author and type of comment.

I would file a feature request for this. Feature Request/Bug Report Form

[try67]

Pretty much all of these things can be achieved if the summary is created

using a custom-made script.

[George_Johnson]

Here's a link to a previous thread that discusses the scripting approach and includes some code that could get you started: Print comments only

[roberth31409345]

Thanks, people.  As I said, I've been all over the forums, and the web.

Ihave used several scripts to get the kind of report I want, or at least get one started. Although have I ever been successful in creating a tool or an 'action' or whatever to call the script on demand, but that's probably just me not having the patience to figure out where the scripts are really supposed to go and how to properly attach them to a button or a menu or whatever it is that I'm supposed to.

My point is that this shouldn't be something I have to do on the fly.  It should be a feature in the product itself. And I'm hoping to gauge interest in making the request to Adobe (thanks DocumentGeek for the link to the report forum. Which I couldn't find on my own. Not sure why.)