One of the coolest, most powerful (and sadly the least used) new features in iOS 9 is the Markup tool in Mail. This feature allows you to quickly add signatures, lines, arrows, magnification circles and text boxes to any PDF or image file with the tap of a button. Once the changes are made, another tap allows you to easily send that file via the Mail app.
This is a great tool for signing contracts, marking up documents, annotating images and more. So why aren't more people using it? Quite frankly, because I think that most people don't know that it exists! So that's why I wrote this post. To educate and encourage you to use this tool. So let's dive in!
First of all, accessing the markup tool isn't necessarily the most obvious, until you know what you're looking for. To start, we will add an image or PDF to an email we want to send. Next, we tap and hold on that file and choose the Markup tool:
This will open that file in the markup utility where we can choose to add lines, arrows, circles, magnification circles, text boxes and signatures.
I won't go into all the details of each function here, so take a few minutes to play with each of them. Try changing colors, resizing magnification circles and changing lines into arrows (hint, to create an arrow, just draw an arrow... the utility is smart enough to figure it out).
When you're done, simply tap on "Done" and we will return to our Mail message with annotations in tact. To ensure that the recipient will view the annotations exactly how we intended, the multiple layers are flattened into a single layer.
One of the most common ways that I use this tool is reviewing, signing and returning contracts and other PDF documents. Below is a sample video that walks you through the process of how that works.
