Annotating PDFs, Syncing with Dropbox

[tanousjm]

Hi Everyone,

I am wondering if anyone has insight into if/how the iPad would support working with PDFs and Dropbox. Here is my situation:

As a student, I scan my casebooks to PDFs, OCR them with Acrobat, then put them on Dropbox where they are synced between my Mac Pro at home and my MacBook Air at school. I use Preview.app to read my assignments, highlight text, and otherwise annotate or mark-up the PDFs. All those annotations are synced back to Dropbox.

This is a great solution as I only have to carry a 3 pound Air instead of 50 pounds of casebooks. The problem is that reading hundreds of pages all day from a laptop is extremely uncomfortable and has been killing my posture and my back. I've been waiting for the "Apple Tablet" to rescue me for a long time. With Apple's decision to use a fairly closed system for the iPad, however, I'm left wondering if I have been waiting in vain.

Do we know yet if the iPad will allow me to view and annotate PDFs the same way that Preview.app does? And, if so, will apps like Dropbox be able to access the PDFs I view and edit on the iPad and sync my changes? Basically, I'm hoping for the same setup and interaction that I enjoy now on my MacBook with the huge advantage of the iPad's tablet form factor so that I can finally lean back and read from a more comfortable position.

Thanks for any insight you can provide.

 

[Bodhi395]

If Apple doesn't officially release a preview type app that will let you annotate pdfs, I'm pretty certain there will be some 3rd party app out there that will have the capability of doing that. Then you could save them to a Dropbox program on your ipad(assuming the file system on the ipad lets apps share files with each other), and sync it back to your macbook.

I think 3rd party apps are the solution to alot of the missing features on the ipad.