A collaborative PDF review tool

This tool allows end users to upload PDF documents and share comments relating to specific aspects. This is a bit like the comment system used by common PDF viewers, but designed to be hosted centrally and easy to access.

It aims to offer a number of features:

• Easy for users to create new reviews
• Scalable to large numbers of comments
• Export comments back into PDF for archival
• RSS feeds of comments
• Available offline

The source for this is written in python, so should be hosted in a web environment capable of executing python, along with all necessary python dependencies. A python virtual environment can also be used.

Care should be taken to ensure subfolders are not browsable, since these are designed to store all reviews currently ongoing on the system.

Configuration is done by way of a configuration file, config.py. Since this varies from one installation to the next, this should be configured according to each specific case.

In particular, paths to required tools such as ghostscript should be specified, along with a dedicated authentication interface to identify users.

An example configuration is provided in config.py.sample

The tool is currently functional and is ready to be used. There are a number of limitations that are currently being worked on. See the issues list for more details.