Make light work of boring forms and collaborate more easily with others
PDFs are brilliant things: they work on everything, they ensure that documents look the same on every kind of device and have become a worldwide standard for sharing documents – especially work ones.
PDF owes a lot of its success to Apple, because Apple has been a big supporter of it for decades. But, all that aside, PDFs can famously be painful to edit, annotate or complete – or at least, they were until recently. Markup on your Mac, iPhone and iPad made it easy to annotate or sign PDFs, and Apple has now added even more PDF improvements.
To use Markup just go to a photo in Photos, select Edit, then tap the Markup button (it looks like a pen nib in a circle). Now you can draw on the photo, or tap the + button to add stickers and more. The same features are available when you open a PDF in Mail or elsewhere, like in the Notes and Files apps.
Document management
PDF documents in Notes or Files now appear full width to make them even easier to read and annotate. You can also use Live Collaboration to work on the same PDF at the same time with other people. And, like all Notes, you can now organise PDFs into folders and use tags to make them easier to find. That means Notes in particular has become a really useful document manager, enabling you to scan to PDF, import PDFs from other sources, and organise and classify everything.
Another really important upgrade is that your iPad now uses machine learning for PDF forms. This enables you to add key information from your Contacts data into fields in forms, saving a ton of time: your iPad can intelligently analyse even the most baffling bureaucratic language to work out what information is supposed to go where.
How to Edit PDFs on your iPad
An easy way to get PDFs on to iPad from Mac is to AirDrop them, or save them to a folder you can access from the iPad Files app. Here we’ve opened a PDF directly in Files, then tapped the Markup icon to bring up the drawing tools.
You can work on the same PDF in real time with someone else. Tap on the Share button, then change Send Copy from the menu to Collaborate. Once you’ve done that, tap on the bit below: Only Invited People Can Edit.
Set your collabora
