In recent months, I’ve been using iAnnotate in my sermon prep. iAnnotate is an iPad app that reads and marks up PDFs.
Before this app, I printed out the scriptures I planned to use in my sermon. As I read over the text, I’d mark it up with a highlighter, marking keywords and phrases, and jotting down notes and ideas. With iAnnotate, I basically do the same thing. The advantage of the app is that I’m more likely to carry my iPad than paper printouts. And I’m less likely to lose my iPad!
To get the document on my iPad, I copy the scripture text from biblegateway.com and paste it into a template in the Pages app on my Mac. In the template, I have adjusted margins, text size, and line heights to be readable on the iPad (16 pt. Helvetica Neue, 1.6 line height, with 1 inch margins on the top and sides, 0.75 on the bottom). I save the document as a PDF in the Dropbox folder on my Mac which automatically syncs to iAnnotate via Dropbox on my iPad. Then, I simply open iAnnotate on my iPad and click on the PDF. It’s a very smooth process.
iAnnotate is a feature-rich app. So far, it’s more than meeting my needs. Ideally, I’d like to spend at least a week soaking in the text before studying the text and mapping out a sermon in the second week (the week before delivery).
Let me know if you have any questions in the comments below. If you use a similar or different tool, or process, please share that as well!
Here are some examples of documents I’ve used in recent weeks. The toolbar on the right can be customized to include the tools you use most often (there are many to choose from).
This is great! Have you heard of any other options for taking notes or is this still the next option you’ve seen? Thank you!
Thanks for the comment. There are all kinds of options. Since my iPad is old, I really haven’t been using this for a while, but the concepts/learnings are the same, I think. Just use whatever you have access to, and make the most of it.