NOTES from first trial:

1) Why does the PDF have to be created from InDesign CC2019? I can't understand the technical reason for this and it's a HUGE drawback.

2) I did several markups over 3 pages of a 50+ page PDF. The ones that imported worked well - a few striketrhoughs and a few text replacments.

3) Several of the edits did not work - it said they could not be mapped. Why not? No rhyme or reason to which ones failed. If they are basic text edits done with the commenting tools, they had better ALL work or it's worthless. Editors will not accept 75% of edits being OK and the other 25% being lost. Adobe really needs to figure out why some don't work.

4) Annotations plugin from DTP tools adds a highlight to show where an edit has been made. (Jan put this in at my suggestion). It's extremely helpful because I can accept all edits for a whole page at a time, then go check them. Often the editor includes an extra word space, or removes a word space, or misses one charactrer or punctuation mark when striking out text.

5) I would STRONGLY encourage the Adobe team to use the Annotations plugin and see how it works, and emulate as much as they can about it (except the import annotations dialog, which is substandard and wonky). But, here are some features they should copy:

a) having indicators in the InDesign showing all the annotations locations BEFORE you accept them (because sometimes they come in wrong, which usually means you edited the InDesign file since the PDF was made);

b) highlighting the edits after they have been made until you choose to remove those;

c) the small comment dialog that shows the text of a comment, whether it's a text edit or a design comment - with these, at least we can still copy the text from a comment even when it was done as a sticky note, rather than having to copy it from Acrobat.

d) the ability to choose which page to start on - because you know some people omit pages from PDFs, or send partial pdfs to editors

e) the ability to work on a PDF saved as spreads. I know this is not how it should be done; but many designers give spread pdfs to clients because the clients are not smart enough to view the pdf as spreads in Acrobat, or print them out as spreads, so they are dummy-proofing their output. I tell designers that if they do this, make sure to give them a single-pages pdf for editing, but you cannot control the editors and they will edit the spreads pdf if it exists. With Annotations, this is not technically supposed to work, but it does!

I fully expect that, as they did with Endnotes, Adobe will include a half-baked version of this in the next release and it will make the whole process horrible for all who use it. Right now we have enough trouble getting people to understand the difference between using comments to annotate a PDF and editing the PDF directly. I have seen several projects where an editor spent many hours directly editing a PDF and then sent that to us to import. A complete waste of time but they simply do what seems obvious to them before asking anybody and Adobe makes it "intuitive" so there is no reason to think this is not a good idea. It would be nice if Adobe spent 5 minutes thinking about human nature and how people in the real world use their products before adding or removing tools, but as we have seen in many instances, such as the addition of the [+] overrides toggle that automatically adds blue highlighting and has freaked out many a designer, they spent very little time trying to understand their users. So, I have ZERO confidence that this feature will be worth using until at least 4 updates, if ever.

p.s. still waiting for live endnotes that work; until then I have to keep CC2017 running so I can import Word files that have footnotes and then bring them into CC2018. I know there is a script for that but it's easier to just import them correctly.