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The document viewer in the Vault UI allows users to mark up and comment on documents with a wide variety of annotations. Users can choose to create comment, line, link, or anchor annotations, and can reply to other annotations. Learn about Document Annotations in Vault Help.

Through the following endpoints, you can:

  • Retrieve a PDF of a document or document version, which includes all annotations in Adobe standard format
  • Import new annotations to the latest version of a document or a specific document version
  • Retrieve all anchor IDs for a document
  • Retrieve all note annotations for a document in CSV format
  • Retrieve video annotations

CrossLink documents only allow annotations and anchors if they are statically bound to their source document. Dynamically bound CrossLinks do not allow annotations, and the API returns an error when you attempt to export or import annotations to or from a dynamically bound CrossLink document.

You can view and annotate PDFs with the following applications:

  • Adobe® Reader®: All versions currently supported by Adobe®
  • Adobe® Acrobat®: All versions currently supported by Adobe®

You may be able to view and add annotations using other applications, but Vault cannot re-import those annotations. When importing offline annotations, Vault ignores:

  • Edits to existing comments
  • Replies on line, anchor, and link annotations
  • Deleted annotations

Each line you add in Adobe® Acrobat® or Reader® creates its own annotation, which Vault preserves on import. If you create several lines in Adobe® Acrobat®, such as to create an X pattern, Vault imports them as multiple overlapping line annotations.