Annotating, redacting, and building documents

Annotating documents

You can add text and image annotations to a document, such as a sticky note, a comment, or a received date. The available annotation types depend on your site configuration. Many of the annotations support optional hyperlinks (hotspots), and you can customize the line size, color, and fill color.

Depending on your site configuration and security, the annotations can be viewed and edited by other users. The annotation data is stored separately from the document data.

You might need appropriate permissions to add or edit annotations.

When you select an annotation, you can navigate through pages before applying it where you need. This works either when you select an annotation from the toolbar, or if you activate an annotation with the startAnnotation JavaScript method.

Redacting documents

Depending on your site configuration, you can redact documents. For example, you can draw a dark rectangle to cover sensitive or confidential information in a document to prevent others for reading the content.

Your site administrator determines whether the redactions can be permanently added to the underlying document by burning the annotation into the file. Burning the annotation creates a new file with the redaction that you can safely distribute to others. For example, you can email the file to someone who does not have access to IBM Daeja ViewONE.

The content like text, images, and multimedia elements in PDF are redacted completely. As a user, you cannot get the whole redacted content even if it was partially redacted by the admin. As a user, you cannot edit the redacted content by using any PDF editor. As an administrator, you cannot redact partially because you redact for the unauthenticated user only.

Building documents

Depending on your site configuration, you can create a new document by adding, copying, moving, and deleting pages in a PDF or TIFF document that is displayed in the viewer.

Document Builder

Document Builder uses repository-document and repository-annotations when the document is createdThe document built with the source document as it is saved in the repository. The document is also built by using the annotations that are saved in the repository, unless annotations are edited.

The following scenarios explain the effects of this behavior:

1. Scenario 1:

   Two instances of the viewer are opened in document builder mode.

   A document is loaded from a repository into each viewer window.

   The document builder user copies a page from the document in viewer window 1 and pastes the page into the document in viewer window 2.

   While the document builder user is working on the documents, another user or system process alters one or both of the master documents. The document builder user builds the modified document.

   Because one or both of the master documents were altered during the document builder session, the built document contains the pages from the latest saved version of the master documents.

   Result: The document currently displayed in the viewer differs from the newly built document in the system. To prevent this issue occurring, the master document must be locked or checked out when it is retrieved for document builder.

   Note: Versioned documents cannot be affected by this issue. This issue affects situations where the document that a URL refers to change.

2. Scenario 2:

   Two instances of the viewer are opened in document builder mode.

   A document with annotations is loaded from a repository into each viewer window.

   The document builder user copies a page from the document in viewer window 1 and pastes the page into the document in viewer window 2.

   While the document builder user is working on the document, another user or system process alters one or more of the annotations used in one or both master documents.

   The document builder user builds the modified document.

   The built document contains the pages from the latest saved version of the master documents. For pages where the document builder user does not modify annotations in the viewer, the annotations for those pages come from the latest saved annotations version. For pages that the user has modified the annotations in the viewer, those pages contain annotations as seen in the viewer, which might not contain the latest changes.

   Result: The document currently displayed in the viewer differs from the newly built document in the system. To prevent this issue occurring, the master document must be locked or checked out when it is retrieved for document builder.

Restore annotations are not supported in document builder mode.

When in document builder mode, the option to restore annotations is not supported.

When in document builder mode, the option to restore annotations is not supported. The following scenario explains the effects of this behavior:

1. Scenario 1:

   Viewer is loaded in document builder mode.

   A document is loaded from a repository.

   Annotations are created by the user.

   Restore annotations button is disabled.

   JavaScript API reloadAnnotations() is disabled.

   Result: The user cannot reload the annotations from the server. Newly created annotations and edited annotation edits remain.

To restore any newly created annotations, the user must take the following steps:

Remove the page on which annotations are present that you want to restore

Put the page with the original annotations on the clipboard (cut or copy)

Paste the page into the new document location