A.nnotate is a web service for storing and annotating documents. Documents are either uploaded by the user or fetched from a web address supplied by the user. Uploads are accepted as
PDF
Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...
,
Microsoft Word, office formats supported by
OpenOffice and common image formats. When a URL of a web page is entered, the service makes a local copy of the HTML and stylesheet. The service offers a browser
bookmarklet to facilitate making snapshots of web pages.
Uploaded documents are rendered as images on the server and the images are sent to the user's browser for display and annotation. Annotation with regions and arrows is supported for all documents. For text documents, the server also
sends the positions of words on the page allowing the client to offer text search and highlighting. Annotations can
be displayed in the right-hand margin, as floating boxes above the text, or as footnotes. For web snapshots they can also be displayed within the main text flow.
By default, all documents and annotations are private. A user can issue invitations by email to allow other users to
view and annotate a particular document or to access all documents in a folder. A "reply" option on annotations allows
other users to comment on existing annotations offering a form of
Threaded discussion. Access controls allow the document owner to specify what annotators may do, including viewing each other's annotations and defining new tags.
A.nnotate development
Early development of A.nnotate was enabled by proof-of-concept funding to Textensor Limited,
from the Scottish Government for a project on authoring structured content from text
.
The resulting software, "Notate" is described in a white paper from 2007
which included support for
semantic web authoring.
In 2008 the company started selling standalone versions of the system for installation on local hardware and developed an
API allowing web application developers and systems integrators to add annotation capabilities to existing
document management systems. It offers off the shelf modules for integration with
Documentum
Documentum is an enterprise content management platform, now owned by OpenText, as well as the name of the software company that originally developed the technology. EMC acquired Documentum for $1.7 billion in December, 2003. The Documentum pla ...
and
Moodle.
File formats and requirements
Documents are accepted as
PDF
Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...
,
Microsoft Office formats,
ODF
The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument, is an open file format for word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and graphics and using ZIP-compressed XML files. It was developed wi ...
formats and images as PNG, JPEG and GIF.
The client browser requires javascript and cookies to be enabled. A.nnotate can be used with
Firefox,
Internet Explorer (versions 6, 7, and 8),
Safari
A safari (; ) is an overland journey to observe wild animals, especially in eastern or southern Africa. The so-called "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo – particularly form an importa ...
or
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS ...
See also
*
Web annotation
*
List of PDF software
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:A.Nnotate
Note-taking software
QDA software
Social bookmarking