I have book in pdf format. I could print out the book, then highlight phrases, write notes in the margin, etc. But can I do this on the pdf file itself, and avoid printing? Is there a pdf viewer with this capability? Or some other approach that would work without adding too much complication?

I use Mepis 7.0, and read pdf's using either kpdf or adobe reader.

Thanks for any suggestions.

All I can find on my Debian system is 'pdfedit' - it wouldn't hurt to try. I'm not aware of any solid all-around free renderer/editors for PDF, although the 'gnupdf' project is starting work on what is eventually hoped to become such a library.

Actually, I did try pdfedit, which doesn't seem to have this capability (the pdfedit help is very skimpy).

Seems to me there ought to be a way to simply mark on the screen which also displays a pdf, and so what you see would look like a marked up pdf document. Probably this could be done with something like gimp, but would be very slow and awkward to manipulate. If there was a very simple drawing program that could overlay a pdf, that might do it.

Emerson's suggestion leads to some interesting pages, particularly the first which suggests several options. None of them solve my problem tho they may be useful to some reading this post. (ftr: pdfedit offers a menu item to mark text but no indication that it actually works; flpsed does allow one to write text on pdf documents, but doesn't seem to have practical way to do highlighting; scribus does not show anything like the menu indicated and will not import pdf's; pdfescape can handle only small files in its on-line version and it appears that the downloadable version works only with microsoft os). I need to try out the downloadable pdfescape further, and also xournal, which was suggested here. For the time being I will just read the thing in pdf, or maybe get it broken into smaller pieces as plain text.

I think there's a tool to mark up PostScript, and you can always convert PDF to PostScript. (then convert the edited file back to PDF) I just hadn't suggested that because I think it's a pretty roundabout and horrible way to do things and will be exceedingly annoying if you wanted to mark something, say, every 10 minutes.

It looks like the pdf reader for kde4, okular, allows highlighting, notes, and other kinds of markup. I just tried it out myself, but it seems to work pretty well, though the information in the markups seem to be saved in your home folder in the .kde/share/apps/okular/docdata rather than in the pdf files themselves.

This would be the closest. Open the pdf file in some kind of pdf viewer, print it to files (postscript) having each page as one file, open up the ps file in gimp, mark it up as you want, save the ps files, join the files together with psjoin, use ps2pdf to bring it back to pdf form.

That's what I did last year, although I read that gimp can edit pdf files directly now. So you could check that out.