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How to review and comment on a PDF in your browser (sticky notes, highlights, live co-review)

Drop sticky-note comments anywhere on a PDF, highlight or strike through found text, and download a copy with everything baked in — all in your browser with no upload.

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Review & comment lets you click anywhere on a PDF to leave a sticky-note comment, highlight or strike through text you find, and download a copy with everything baked in. It runs entirely in your browser: the PDF never leaves your device, and your notes are stored locally too.

Before you start

  • Solo review at /app/review is free and needs no account.
  • Notes save automatically in this browser, keyed to the PDF's content — drop the same file again later and your notes come back.
  • Permission-restricted PDFs are unlocked on your device automatically when you drop them (you'll see "Unlocked this protected PDF on your device — nothing was uploaded"). A PDF that needs an open password should go through Unlock first.
  • On download, notes and markup are drawn onto the page as visible ink — every PDF reader shows them. They are not hideable popup annotations.

Steps

  1. Open Review & comment and drop your PDF onto the drop zone (or click it to pick a file). If you've reviewed this exact file before, a message like "Loaded 3 previous notes on this PDF" confirms your notes were restored.
  2. Click anywhere on a page to drop a sticky note. A marker appears at the click point and the comment box in the sidebar is focused — type your comment.
  3. Optional: set Your label in the sidebar (it defaults to "Me") so baked notes carry your name, and pick a note color from the four swatches: Yellow, Light blue, Mint green, or Rose pink.
  4. To mark up text, type in the Find text in this PDF… box. The counter shows how many matches there are (for example "4 matches on 2 pages"), and matches glow yellow on the page you're viewing. Click Highlight to highlight every match, or Strike to strike through every match.
  5. Delete any note or markup with its trash icon. Everything auto-saves as you work; Save now forces a save if you want the reassurance.
  6. Click Download annotated. The button is enabled once you have at least one note or markup. You get yourfile-with-notes.pdf — your original file is untouched.

What bakes into the download

AnnotationHow it appears in the downloaded PDF
Sticky noteA colored box pinned where you clicked, with your label in the header and the comment text below
HighlightA translucent color wash over the matched text — the text stays readable under it
StrikethroughA line through the middle of the matched text

Review live with someone (Pro)

Share for review turns a solo session into a private peer-to-peer room. Real-time review is a Pro feature (during the private beta, everything is free); both people sign in.

  1. Click Share for review. Your current notes stay safe on this device — the room starts fresh.
  2. In the room, click Start session, then Copy the room link and send it to your reviewer.
  3. They open the link, sign in, and click Join review. The PDF streams directly from your browser to theirs over a WebRTC connection — the document bytes never touch AttachKit's server (only the small connection-setup messages do).
  4. Both of you click to drop notes, and edits sync live. You can only edit or delete your own notes; the other person's carry a "peer" tag and are read-only for you.
  5. Either side can click Download with notes to bake the combined notes into a copy.

Note: the find-and-markup tools (highlight and strikethrough) are solo-only today — the room syncs sticky notes.

Result

You get …-with-notes.pdf: a copy of your PDF with every note drawn on the page as a labeled colored box, plus any highlights and strikethroughs. Because the annotations are real page content, they look the same in Acrobat, Preview, a browser tab, or a print-out — nobody can miss them or toggle them off. Your original PDF is unchanged, and your editable notes remain in this browser in case you want to revise and re-download.

If your PDF is a scan with no selectable text, find-and-highlight won't have anything to search — run it through Make searchable (OCR) first, then re-open it here. Sticky notes work on scans either way.

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