Reply to annotations in our JavaScript PDF viewer

Annotation replies allow you to create a thread of comments in a PDF document. Nutrient Web SDK will display any comments you create as a threaded conversation.

A thread of comments

In addition, if you open a document where comments were created by any of the Nutrient SDKs, these comments will be displayed in a thread too.

Annotation replies created by other PDF software aren’t yet supported by Nutrient Web SDK, and they’ll be displayed as individual note annotations.

Disabling replies

If you want to prevent users from replying to comments while still allowing them to create new top-level comments, you can use the setIsEditableComment method:

instance.setIsEditableComment((comment) => {
  return !comments.find((_comment) => _comment.rootId === comment.rootId);
});

How this works:

  • The code above prevents editing of replies by checking if the comment is the root of a thread (i.e. no other comment has it as a root).

With this configuration, users can still create new comments on the document, but they won’t be able to add replies to existing comments.