Tools for writing referee reports When refereeing a paper, I usually receive a pdf version of a paper and then write my report separately in latex or a text file editor. When it comes to specific comments to the text, I like to include a page number and line number to specify the relevant position in the text, although counting the line numbers is pretty boring for long papers. I was wondering if there were any tips on how to speed up this process?


  Ideally, I would like to edit comments directly in the pdf file of the paper, and then
  export the comments, along with the page numbers/line numbers, to a
  text file.


I guess this would only work in some cases, when it is possible to extract line numbers for the pdf. Is anyone aware of ways of doing something like this?

Thanks in advance!
I've just taken to returning two documents when reviewing papers:


One is my annotated PDF (created on a tablet) where I can use both margin notes if I want to comment on things, and handwritten notes if I want to draw into a figure or mark up typos. The notes in this document are the smaller comments specific to individual places in the document.
A text file in which I collect the more general, less location-specific comments such as when I discuss the paper's overall structure, how it fits into the existing literature, etc.


This has worked pretty well for me because it allows me to annotate the manuscript right away, and getting back to the bigger items when I've read it all. The only tricky part is that your PDF reader may leave your name in the PDF for all annotations (depending on whether or not you've set it up that way). If you care about your anonymity, you can always edit it out: My PDF reader puts my name in clear text in the .pdf document, and I can just search-replace it by some other string.