Studying Online;Succeeding through Distance Learning at University

Online notetaking 79 
have been doing it for years. However, doing that when materi-
als are online is complex or cumbersome. Te ebook suppliers do 
allow you to make notes and highlight passages, as explained in 
Chapter 3. You will, however, be encountering a great deal of ma-
terial that is not in an ebook system. Tere will be web pages, doc-
uments that you download, PDFs that you view online, and so on. 
Annotating PDFs 
If you wish to annotate PDFs, the software that comes with your 
computer may not be able to do this. Tis was mentioned in a 
set of interviews with students by the software company Wonder-
share, the manufacturers of PDFelement. A San Francisco student 
said, “I need to annotate the text clearly and concisely, but the 
default PDF editor on my laptop was not capable of annotation, 
reading scanned texts and other functions. It made completing 
work for my courses difcult” (Wondershare, 2021). Tis is a com-
mon fnding. Students want to annotate the PDFs they have to 
read but cannot do so unless they purchase additional software. 
You will fnd a list of suitable PDF programs at the website I have 
created to accompany this book, https://studyingonline.tips. 
Annotating web pages 
Much of what you read online will be in the form of web pages. 
Annotating these can be difcult. For instance, you may need to 
save the web page, convert it to PDF, and then annotate it. Tat 
takes time. Tere are two main ways you can annotate and add 
notes to web pages: 
1. Take a screenshot and annotate it 
2. Get specialist browser extensions that allow you to save anno-
tated pages. 
Computers come with screenshot software; however, their fea-
tures are limited. Often, they cannot capture a scrolling web page, 

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