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I bought a Microsoft Surface primarily for taking notes during lectures and also writing notes on PDFs that I am studying. I bought it after seeing how useful this functionality was on my friends Samsungs tablet, and another friends Apple tablet.

However working with PDFs has turned out to be a disaster with the Surface. Unlike the case of my friends tablets where they just open a PDF and can scroll through the pages and write over them at will with the stylus, when I import a PDF into Onenote it imports it as a set of separate pages each one overload over the regular copybook style background. And if I want to move to the another page, I have to click the page name on the sidebar and then wait about 3 or 4 seconds for the page to load. Every time. This is terrible usability as I am working with equations that often run into the following page and hence I have to keep glancing back and forward at other pages.

Is there a way to import the document into OneNote as a whole to avoid this page loading issue? If not, are there any apps out there for the Surface that are able to provide continuous scrolling (without scrolling) of PDFs while letting you write over the PDFs?

sonicboom
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6 Answers6

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Xodo This amazing PDF reader and editor is completely free, which is frankly surprising considering what you're getting here. Just open a PDF file and you're given free reign over what you can do. Write all over it, highlight the important bits, and save it as a new file. This is especially useful for quickly filling out those annoying forms that you usually have to type information into. Free at Microsoft

Raja Sachithanantham
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On Onenote, there's a setting you can uncheck if you want the entire PDF (all the pages) to import to a single page.

Go to File | Options | Advanced, and scroll down to Printouts section.

Uncheck the checkbox for the option to "Insert long printouts on multiple pages".

blakejared
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Have you tried Drawboard PDF? It's pretty much what you describe. (MS Store Link)

It's basically a PDF reader that allows you to draw on PDF pages and save the result as a PDF. I havn't seen much lag browsing PDF documents (less than 100 pages with many images).

Initial load takes a little while though, the tool has to pre-render all pages for faster browsing.

havin_a_bad_fur_day
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I came here in 2022 looking for a similar answer, for my Microsoft Surface Studio.

Microsoft Edge is actually a fairly good option here.

  • native app
  • no lag in pen input
  • can do all the things you'd want to do with a pen
  • seems to cope with hand resting on screen whilst you draw (not as good as Apple's iPad / Pencil setup, but still pretty good)

Cheers!

Vinciture
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Importing into OneNote is a simple function of printing. OneNote installs a "Print to OneNote" printer on your computer that allows you to "print" any printable document into a OneNote Notebook.

When printing into OneNote, you select the Section you wish the pages to go to and OneNote will create new pages for the new content. If you select a Page in the destination dialog, it will append the new document to that existing page, which kinda sounds like what's happening for you.

music2myear
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GRAHL PDF Annotator is fantastic for writing on and otherwise annotating PDFs, and for navigating on PDFs. I use it with my Surface Pro with very large PDF files. I also just OneNote heavily, but OneNote really doesn't work well for large PDF files.

user932418
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