From classroom highlights to legal contract review — PDF Agile's annotation tools handle it all, 100% offline.
PDF Agile's highlighting tool supports five distinct colors — yellow, green, blue, pink, and red — giving you a complete color-coding system for any annotation workflow. Each color can carry a different meaning in your personal system: yellow for key facts, green for definitions, red for critical warnings, blue for supporting evidence, and pink for action items.
Highlights are applied by selecting text and clicking your chosen color in the annotation toolbar. The highlight is stored as a standard PDF annotation object, which means it displays correctly in Adobe Reader, Foxit, Chrome, and Preview on macOS when you share the file.
Sticky notes in PDF Agile automatically capture the author name from your application settings and stamp each note with the date and time it was created. This makes sticky notes invaluable for collaborative document review — every comment is traceable to a person and a moment in the review cycle.
Notes appear as small icons on the page in view mode, keeping the document visually clean. Click the icon to expand the note into its full pop-up display. You can sort all notes by page order, author, or date from the Comments panel, making it easy to navigate a heavily annotated document.
Beyond highlighting, PDF Agile provides underline, strikethrough, and squiggly underline markup tools — the standard editorial annotation set used in document review workflows. Strikethrough marks text for deletion; underline marks text for emphasis or for insertion of a note; squiggly underline flags spelling or grammar issues in proofread documents.
All three markup types are rendered using PDF standard annotation objects, ensuring they appear correctly when opened in other PDF viewers. They support the same author and color customization as highlights, making them a seamless part of a unified annotation workflow.
PDF Agile includes a library of pre-built stamps that are used in professional document workflows: APPROVED, DRAFT, CONFIDENTIAL, NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, REVIEWED, and more. Each stamp can be placed anywhere on the page, resized, and rotated. Stamps include the placement date automatically in some configurations.
For signature workflows, PDF Agile provides a freehand signature drawing tool as well as image-based signature import (PNG with transparency). Upload a scan or image of your handwritten signature and apply it to contracts, approval forms, or certifications without printing and scanning the document.
When a document review is complete, PDF Agile can export all annotations — highlights, sticky notes, stamps, and markup — into a structured TXT or CSV file. Each exported record includes the page number, annotation type, author, date/time, and the full text of the comment or the highlighted passage.
This export capability is especially valuable for legal review workflows where a client deliverable requires a summary of all reviewer comments, or for academic research where you need to compile all annotated passages from a PDF into a notes document without manually copying each one.
Every annotation operation in PDF Agile happens entirely on your local machine. No file is uploaded to a server, no network connection is required, and no data is logged by a third-party service. This makes PDF Agile the annotation tool of choice for environments with strict data handling requirements — law firms, healthcare organizations, government agencies, and enterprises under GDPR or HIPAA obligations.
Offline operation also means PDF Agile works at full speed regardless of internet connection quality, imposes no file size limits based on bandwidth, and remains fully functional in air-gapped or restricted network environments.
| Feature | MarkupPDF (PDF Agile) | Adobe Acrobat Reader | Foxit Reader |
|---|---|---|---|
| Multi-color highlight (5 colors) | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Sticky notes with author stamp | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Export comments to TXT/CSV | ✅ Yes (free) | ⚠️ Acrobat Pro only | ⚠️ Limited in free |
| 100% offline (no upload) | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Custom stamps & image stamps | ✅ Yes (free) | ⚠️ Acrobat Pro only | ⚠️ Paid version |
| Free to use | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes (view/comment) | ✅ Yes (basic) |
MarkupPDF (PDF Agile) supports annotation on the following document types:
Download PDF Agile and access the full suite of annotation tools — highlights, sticky notes, stamps, and comment export — at no cost.
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