For a very long time, I was rather stuck because, as a scholar in the humanities who uses LaTeX, I could not get people to use LaTeX because they could not annotate people’s work without a professional copy of Acrobat. Well, I have figured out how to do this using Evince. How you may ask? It is a simple process but it is rather hidden and it should be more prominent when looking at PDFs.

These instructions should work on Evince 3.2 in Xubuntu 11.10.

• Open your desired PDF in Evince.
• In the upper left, you should see the word “Thumbnails” and a down arrow.
• Press the down arrow and choose “Annoations”. This will show you the list of annotations in the current PDF.
• You should see an “add” tab. Click on the add tab. There should be a small pencil icon.
• Click on the pencil icon. Your cursor should turn into a plus sign.
• Click where you want to put your annotation. A yellow icon should appear and a small yellow window with your name in the title bar should appear.
• Type your annotation. I had a small bit of trouble getting it to recognize my typing but resizing the yellow window did the trick.
• When you are done, you will need to save the PDF as a different file. I am not sure why this is but if I saved it on top of the old file, it didn’t take the annotations.

Yay!! You can now annotate PDFs in Linux. My life has gotten so much easier now.