Botple Notes

Writing on a PDF without Adobe

Acrobat Reader opens a PDF happily and then puts the useful parts behind a subscription. For a student who needs to answer six questions and hand it in, that is a strange price.

Why the usual advice does not work here

Free readers are readers: they show the page and stop. The tools that do let you type are usually trials, or upload your file to a server so that a website can do the work — which is a lot of trust for a homework sheet.

How to do it

  1. Open your PDFDrag it in. It is opened by your own browser, on your own machine.
  2. Type, draw or highlightType answers, write by hand with a mouse or a stylus, and highlight the question if it helps.
  3. Export and hand it inA new PDF, ready to upload or print.

One honest note

If the worksheet is a real fillable form — the kind with proper form fields — Acrobat Reader will fill it for free and you should just use that. This is for the far more common case where it is not.