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As you've may know, I write a lot about Microsoft products, and must do a lot of research about the products I write about. Sometimes Microsoft makes my life easy by making the technical documentation I need available from the Microsoft Download Center in the form of Microsoft Word documents. If this is the case, I download the .doc or .docx to my Tablet PC, open it in Word 2007, and use my Tablet PC's pen to annotate the document with Ink by underlining or highlighting words or phrases, adding marginal notes, and so on. I like using my Tablet PC for reading because I can lie back on my sofa instead of sitting at my desk.

Now it's easy to annotate a Word doc with Ink, but what if I need to annotate a Web page? For example, say there's a long Microsoft Knowledge Base article I need to read through and annotate -- how I can I annotate a Web page? Unfortunately Internet Explorer only displays Web pages and doesn't let you annotate them with Ink, so what I've usually done in the past is this:

1. Open the Web page I want to read in Internet Explorer.

2. Save the page as a Web Archive (.mht) file if it works - (note: some Web pages can't be saved in .mht format).

3. Open the saved .mht file in Word.

4. Annotate the page with Ink.

5. Save the page in Word format so I can read the page with its annotations later.

That's a lot of steps just to be able to read and annotate a Web page. Fortunately, I discovered an easier way of doing this:

1. Open Word, click the Office button at the top left, and select Open.

2. Type the URL of the page I want to read in the File Name box (or copy and paste the URL from IE's address bar) and click Open.

3. Once the Web page opens in Word, annotate it with Ink.

4. Then save the page in Word format if you need it for later.

That's better, only not always. The reason (I think) is that some Web pages contain complex HTML or XHTML or XML, embedded scripts, are linked to CSS style sheets, and so on, and when you download and open them in Word a lot of this formatting junk is downloaded as well (I think). The net result is that sometimes when you try and read a downloaded page in Word, Word responds sluggishly and the text jerks around as Word tries to interpret all this formatting junk.

What's the solution? First I downloaded and installed the 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS. Then once I've opened a "problem" Web page in Word, I save it as a PDF file instead of in the usual Word format. Then I open the saved PDF file using Grahl Software Design's PDF Annotator and mark it up with Ink by underlining things, highlighting things, adding marginal notes, and so on. PDF Annotator is a really cool program that anyone who uses a Tablet PC will want to buy.
Do you have a different way of annotating Web pages for later reading? If so, I'd like to hear about it!

Microsoft Download Center

Tablet PC

2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS

Grahl Software Design's PDF Annotator

Introducing Windows Server 2008

Windows Vista Resource Kit

ITworld.com

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