The Best iPad Apps to Annotate, Highlight, and Add Comments to PDFs

One of the first reasons behind me buying iPad was to be able to access and read my PDFs anytime anywhere I want without having to always depend on my Mac for that. However, my experience with reading PDFs on iPad has taught me many things and over the time I came to discover a wide range of great apps to use on my PDFs. These are particularly apps which you can use to annotate, highlight, add notes, record, and comment on the content of your PDFs. I have compiled these apps in the list below and want you to have a look.

If there’s an option to download a .MOBI or .EPUB ebook or PDF version of a book, I always choose the latter because of what iAnnotate allows me to do. The app is great for students, writers, or anyone who needs to mark up text as they read.Now that the app allows you to import and annotate Word, as well as PowerPoint documents, it’s almost like annotating content on paper thanks to the iPad’s big screen.

ezPDF Reader is the most comprehensive application for your iPad device. Easily and quickly open & view almost all scanned as well as text based PDFs. With the help of form filling feature, users are able to type anything in form field and even apply marks on various buttons. It also allows you to playback any multimedia file, if it is attached to your PDF document. Users can jump on any desired page by entering it number. The application offers interaction with many clouding services to facilitate easy uploading and downloading of files.

This app allows you to  add text, images and signatures to PDFs, correct text in original PDF with editable text blocks, fill out PDF forms , add notes, comments, and freehand scribbles , draw lines, arrows, rectangles, ellipses and polygons, and organize your documents using Folders.If you want to split a PDF file, you can duplicate it and then delete unwanted pages from each file.

As its name indicate, PDF Highlighter is a powerful app that enables you to highlight important passages, add text notes, freehand sketches, and even voice memos. All your annotations are saved directly to the PDF file, so that you can review them later on a Mac or PC, using standard software like Acrobat Reader or Mac OS X Preview.

This is an app that you can use to manage all the pdf files on your iPad. Fast display, quick page-turning even a thousand pages, useful finger-writing and email your notes to your friends.

 This app does not only read PDFs but also provides a bunch of other interesting services including: Form filling, contract signing, free handwriting, text box, highlighting, sticky notes, stamp tools.The most popular PDF app is the simple PDF reader. So many of the documents available on the Web and emailed to you are in PDF format that you really must have a reader capable of opening and letting you scroll through a PDF.

FastPDF was among the best PDF readers for the iPad we’ve tried, offering quite a lot of functionality and truly living up to its name. Not only does it go through large-sized PDF files in a breeze, its interface is also easy to use and very streamlined, giving you immediate access to the important reading features as well as bookmarking functionality. If you’ve been using the default PDF reader that comes with the iPad, you’ll find the interface of FastPDF very familiar.

PDF Expert 5 is an essential application to store, read, annotate and sign PDFs. Highlight, strike out, draw with your finger or make your notes! Filling out PDF forms is a breeze. Smart zoom and intelligent snapping makes it easier to edit PDFs the way you want it. Sepia mode, text to speech and other helpful features create a great reading experience.

Another PDF reader packed with useful features, Stanza has a clean and streamlined interface that focuses on the content right from the get go, and it allows you to create your custom categories and organize your literature in different ways. And with the integrated dictionary, you’ll never have to switch over to another app for that purpose continuously!

AnnotDoc offers an impressive number of features at a comparatively low price tag, but it is too difficult to use to recommend highly. The app does not include a user guide or help, and instead directs users to its webpage, which was not thorough enough to answer several basic questions. Although AnnotDoc includes all the major features as well as the unique option of adding a watermark to a PDF, it needs to improve its user interface before moving up this AppGuide.