Reviewing and comparing — Nixt PDF docs

The Comments view

The Comments view of the side panel lists every comment and mark in the whole document, not only the current page, because a review is a list you work down.

To open it, click the speech-bubble icon, the last icon at the top of the side panel. If the side panel is hidden, press ⌘</kbd> (Ctrl+</kbd> on Windows and Linux) first.

Each comment shows:

Page 4 · Highlight — the page it is on and what kind of mark it is.
Its status, when it has one: Accepted, Rejected, Completed or Cancelled.
A tick, when it has been ticked off.
What the comment says.
Who wrote it, when the comment records a name.
Each reply, as Name: what they said, or Reply: what they said when the reply has no name.

Click a comment to go to its page.

The kinds of mark are named Highlight, Underline, Strike-through, Squiggle, Note, Drawing, Box, Oval, Line, Shape, Text box, Stamp, Signature, Initials, Picture stamp and Attached file. Marks made by other PDF software are named by their PDF type.

When the document has no comments, the view says Nothing marked on this document yet.

Finding and ordering comments

At the top of the view:

Control	What it does
Search 12 comments box	Shows only comments whose text or replies contain what you type.
Left to do	Shows only comments that haven’t been ticked off. Click again to show them all.
Order button	Shows the current order. Click it to move through Page order, Newest first, Oldest first and By author.

In Newest first and Oldest first, a comment with no date sorts last. When nothing matches, the view says No comment matches that.

Replying, deciding and ticking off

Click the More button (three dots) on the comment’s row.
Choose one of these:

Command	What it does
Reply…	Opens the Reply dialog, showing Replying to and the start of the comment. Type your reply and click Reply.
Accept	Sets the status to Accepted.
Reject	Sets the status to Rejected.
Mark completed	Sets the status to Completed.
Clear the status	Removes the status. Only offered when there is one.
Tick it off	Ticks the comment off for your own tracking. It fades back rather than disappearing.
Not done after all	Takes the tick off again.
Delete this mark	Removes the comment from the page.

Replies and statuses are stored the way the PDF standard defines them, so other PDF readers show the same threads and statuses. A status and a tick are separate: ticking a comment off records that you have dealt with it, whatever you decided about it.

Every one of these is a change to the document that Undo can take back.

Saving the comments as text

Useful for pasting a review into an email.

On the Comment tab, click Save the comments… (or choose More › Save the comments…). It’s dimmed when the document has no comments.
In the Save the comments dialog, choose where to save. The name starts as the document’s name followed by -comments.txt.

Each comment is written in page order, as its page, kind, author and status on one line, its text below, and each reply on a line of its own. Search and Left to do in the Comments view don’t affect what is saved; every comment is included.

Summarising the comments as a PDF

A summary is a separate document listing every comment, for reading the decisions without opening the original.

On the Comment tab, click Summarise… (or choose More › Summarise the comments…).
In the Save the summary dialog, choose where to save. The name starts as the document’s name followed by -comments.pdf.

The summary is an A4 document titled with the document’s name and — comments.

Comparing two versions

Compare tells you what changed between an earlier version of a document and the one you have open. It compares what the pages say, not the bytes of the files, so two exports of the same document don’t show up as completely different.

Open the newer version.
On the Comment tab, click Compare… (or choose More › Compare with another PDF…).
In the Compare with which version? dialog, choose the earlier version.
Read the What changed dialog.

The dialog starts with the two names, earlier first — contract-v1.pdf → contract-v2.pdf — and a summary:

No differences. The two documents read the same.
2 pages added, 14 lines removed. — counts of pages and lines added and removed.
3 pages differ. — when pages changed without whole lines being added or removed.

Below the summary, each page that changed is listed:

Label	Meaning
Added	A page in the newer version that the earlier one doesn’t have.
Removed	A page of the earlier version that is gone.
Changed	Lines on the page were added or removed.
Same words, different page	The text is the same but the page is not: something moved, was re-typeset or changed colour.

The page is named as Page 5, Page 5 → 6 when it moved, Page 9 added or Page 3 removed.
The page size or rotation differs. appears when it does.
Up to six changed lines are shown, with + for added and − for removed. and 8 more lines — the saved report has them all says how many more there are.
Go there closes the dialog and goes to the page in the document you have open. Removed pages have no Go there.

Pages are matched before their lines are compared, so inserting one page near the front doesn’t report every later page as changed.

Saving the comparison

In the What changed dialog, click Save the report….
In the Save the comparison dialog, choose where to save. The name starts as the document’s name followed by -changes.txt.

The report lists every changed page and every changed line.

Comparing scanned documents

A scan has no text to compare. When either document is a scan, the summary says so — for example Neither document has text to compare — it is a scan. Only page count and page size were checked. Use Recognise text… on the scans first; see Scanned documents.