Introduction to Spark PDF
Spark PDF is a desktop PDF viewer and markup tool built for construction, engineering and technical review workflows. It opens PDF documents, lets you annotate and measure them, and exports the result back to PDF — all in a single Windows application.
What Can Spark Do?
| Area | Capability |
|---|---|
| View | Single-page and continuous scroll modes with multi-pane split view (left/right, top/bottom, quad) |
| Annotate | 30+ shape tools, text markup (highlight, underline, strikethrough, squiggly), freehand drawing, polyline, polygon, arrows, callouts |
| Stamp & sign | Pre-built approval stamps plus custom image stamps and hand-drawn or image-imported signatures |
| Cloud markup | Rectangular, circular and free-form revision clouds with outward / inward bump direction |
| Edit | Select tool with move, resize, rotate, per-vertex drag handles, and right-click insert / delete control points |
| Measure | Distance, perimeter, area, rectangle and circle measurements, count markers, with scale calibration |
| OCR | On-demand OCR for a full page or a selected region; copy recognised text |
| Pages | Insert, delete, reorder, rotate, crop, duplicate, import and export pages |
| Forms | Fill PDF form fields; import/export form data |
| Redact | Mark and permanently burn-in redactions with an optional overlay label |
| Review | Cloud annotations with intensity and direction control; comments via sticky notes and text callouts |
| Undo / Redo | Full history across all annotation edits (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y) |
Who Is Spark For?
- Engineers and designers reviewing drawings and specifications
- Construction estimators doing measurement and takeoff
- QA reviewers marking up revisions and redlines
- Project managers approving and stamping documents
- Site teams filling inspection forms and attaching photos
How Spark Thinks About a Document
At the highest level, a Spark session always has:
A Document → Zero or more Panes → One or more Pages → Zero or more Annotations
(the PDF) (split view regions) (rendered pages) (your markups)Annotations are stored in page-relative coordinates, independent of zoom — when you zoom in, they scale with the page. When you save to PDF, annotations are written back to the file in the standard PDF annotation layer.
What This Guide Covers
Read top-to-bottom to learn Spark from scratch, or jump to the section you need. The recommended first path:
- Getting Started (you are here) — orientation.
- Core Concepts — tools, selection, and the difference between annotations, markups and measurements.
- Viewing Documents — modes, zoom, split view.
- Annotations — pick the tool you need and start marking up.
After that, come back for editing, measurement and page management deep-dives.