Commenting to Work Seamlessly with existing PDF comments

[Kelly V.5]

Currently, all of my PFs in dropbox have PDF comments on them, which are viewable in Acrobat, Adobe Reader, Foxit, Nitro, Apple Preview, and about every other PDF reader I can think of. But when I view those PDFs in dropbox.com, the comments are non-existent. Likewise, the comments I make in dropbox.com are not visible when I open the document in Acrobat.

Is there a way to make these comments interchangeable, so that when they are always there, even when I open the PDF in Acrobat (when the comments were made in dropbox.com).

Even if I could export the comments as an FDF file from dropbox, that would be a great compromise.

[Rich · Accepted solution]

Is there a way to make these comments interchangeable

No, there isn't. The commenting feature in Dropbox is independent from the comments in the file itself. The comments made in Adobe, etc., are in the file. The comments made on Dropbox are in the Dropbox system, not the file. Also, what you're viewing online in Dropbox is a preview of the original file. To view the original file (with comments intact), the file must be downloaded and opened in Adobe Reader or another supported application.

[Kelly V.5]

That is really unfortunate. Dropbox comments will be of no use for me then, because I store all of my PDFs as commented files right on my local drive. I was hoping that none of my clients would use dropbox comments, because it just makes more work for me to have to manually convert them to standard PDF comments. 

But I wanted to just chime back in here and let you know that one of my clients used dropbox commenting for the first time today. I'm going to tell her to not do that anymore, and to just use PDF commenting in Reader or Acrobat.

If the dropbox commenting tool ever become interchangeable with existing PDF commenting tools (where the comments actually get embedded in the PDF), I'll proclaim it from the rooftops, but for now, I'm going to tell people to steer clear of it.

[ronanhughes]

not impressed with Dropbox on this, surely their should be some sort of output to allow you to store comments seperately

[Kelly V.5]

I found some serious issues with Dropbox commenting and did an informative blog post for other who  might be considering incorporating it into their workflows.