Document Annotations

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 all annotations or only specific types of annotations for a document version
Retrieve a specific annotation by ID
Retrieve all replies to an annotation
Delete annotations
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.

Supported PDF Editors

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.