As I said a while back, I think the iPad -- with PDF Expert -- is an interesting medium for revising a manuscript, but it will never replace paper for me. Right now I'm putting the revise of next year's book <em>The Plague Doctor</em> to bed.

I tried to do that on the iPad but gave up and resorted to printing out the pages. It really is the easiest solution. You see more, you're reading the book away from the computer screen, you can flick backwards and forwards easily.

Trouble is time constraints meant I had to finish that process here in Florence, in a rented apartment. I no longer have a printer. How do I do the final <em>final</em> revise? The iPad of course...

What am I trying to do with this last pass of the book? Simple: revise the changes. I have to take it on faith that I can't do any more to the unchanged bits. That's going to have to go through the line editor: I'm blind to the old stuff by this stage. But I do need to look at the new text I've written in, since that's raw and unrevised too.

The simple way to do this within Word (or Apple Pages) is to turn on change tracking. Then you get the usual coloured text for additions, moves and deletions. You can print these out from Word. The trouble is you then get the large revisions sidebar added to the page which, for me, makes them unreadable on the iPad. Either you zoom into to lose the sidebar or you zoom out for the full page and the main text is unreadable.

I couldn't find a way to print out a Word document the way I wanted to see it: with the changed text in the main document but without any sidebar. If someone out there knows how do please let me know. But there's always Pages...

<span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif;line-height:19px;"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-6720" title="Pages markup" src="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/screen-shot-2011-01-17-at-08-51-011.png?w=640" alt="" width="640" height="109" /></span>

<span style="font-size:13px;font-family:Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif;line-height:19px;"> </span>With that you can choose to hide the side pane while still seeing your changes.  I also want to make sure my additions are underlined and my excisions crossed out.

<a href="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/screen-shot-2011-01-17-at-08-55-391.png"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-6721" title="Pages setup" src="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/screen-shot-2011-01-17-at-08-55-391.png" alt="" width="450" height="151" /></a>

If you don't do this you just get coloured text for what's changed and delete. The same colour out of the box, which is confusing.

With these selections I then export to pdf and transfer to the iPad using Dropbox. Inside PDF Expert (here with the annotation tools showing, though they are usually out of the way for reading) it now looks like this. Changed text in blue with a helpful black line in the side to show.

<a href="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/excisions1.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-6722" title="excisions" src="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/excisions1.jpg?w=640" alt="" width="640" height="553" /></a>

I still find this a bit too much information frankly. I think it's easier to look at the new text only, not the excisions, which I saw anyway on paper. And, of course, I can go back to those easily on the machine. So I choose the 'view without delete' option which you can see in the first screenshot above and get this.

<a href="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/photo1.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-6723" title="photo" src="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/photo1.jpg?w=640" alt="" width="640" height="556" /></a>

I then scribble on bits that need changing and when I'm finished go yto PDF Expert's bookmark menu which keeps a list of where the annotations are.

<a href="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/pdf1.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-6725" title="pdf" src="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2011/01/pdf1.jpg" alt="" width="490" height="501" /></a>

And that's it really. Hope that was useful -- and you have a few paragraphs from next year's book there too.