Vincent Hunink on how PDF Expert helps to inspire students to learn Latin

Vincent Hunink is a Latinist who teaches students and does his translation work in one of the Dutch universities. Apart from his passion for Classics, he is also fond of railways and train travels and listening to old-fashioned German radio. Vincent is a true tech enthusiast: he follows tech blogs and likes to test new apps, especially if they help him to streamline his workflows. 

We talked to Vincent to find out more about his PDF Expert experience and how the app helps him to engage and inspire students to learn such a complicated subject as the Latin language. 

Managing thousands of Latin texts

Vincent works with dozens of Latin texts daily, both paper books and digital documents, and often needs to customize course papers before sharing them with his students or translating Latin texts to Dutch. To do this the ability to scan textbooks is an essential aspect enabling Vincent to create more engaging course materials, as digital documents are much easier to use and edit. With the help of PDF Expert Vincent has now amassed a digital library of over 3,000 Latin textbooks.

This also helps Vincent to take a more sustainable, eco-friendly approach to teaching as he can instantly turn scanned textbooks into editable PDFs to make them look clean (removing inconsistencies and wraps). 

Vincent has 3 big screens on his work desk, which he uses all at the same time. For example, for document translation, he opens Latin text on one screen, English translation on the second one, and commentary doc on the third one. 

Fun fact: 

Except for Latin, Vincent also speaks Dutch, English, German, French, a bit of Swedish, and Italian. He fell in love with Latin back in 1980 and this took him on a lifetime journey of learning and practicing languages.  

Over the years, Vincent created his own system of digitilizing, saving, and editing his documents. For this task, it’s imperative that Vincent uses software he can rely on so he uses cloud storage, file management software, and PDF Expert. His most common toolkit for the day, apart from University native apps, consists of Path Finder, Spark, and PDF Expert. 

Inspiring students to become researchers 

In addition to speeding up his own workflow, Vincent's primary focus is on empowering his students not just to study Classics, but to find their place in this field of study. He wants to change the way students approach the text or material, and not just transport learnings into their heads by inspiring them to become more effective researchers and find answers by themselves.

"My mission is to create a sense of responsibility in my students for the subjects they are studying. I want them to change their minds. When they enter University, Classics is very strange and difficult for them, an area of others; and I want to inspire them to find their place in this field. I want them to ask questions and find means and tools to investigate, to do research, and to come up with answers." - says Vincent. 

PDF Expert is a crucial tool for Vincent, as it allows him to adapt all coursework materials to create the most customized and engaging learning experience for his students. 

So how does this look in reality? Vincent’s typical workflow for a new topic (for example, Roman epic), looks like this:

1. Vincent prepares up to 20 PDF documents that are stored in numerical or alphabetical order and share them with students. 
2. He preps these documents in advance and makes changes to them in PDF Expert so that they will be clean and precise. 
3. He removes introductions, edits them, adding pages or a bit of text. 
4. He doesn't annotate or highlight anything - he encourages students to do this themselves.
5. Students then use these documents on their devices.

To facilitate this workflow Vincent typically relies on PDF Expert features such as:

• Reading (especially the split view),
• Annotation (mostly during translation work, adding comments or highlighting specific sentences he is working on),
• Editing (to remove unnecessary pieces of text),
• Scanning and OCR (to make scanned books look clean),
• Page management (to reorder pages or merge documents).

Vincent is a long-time PDF Expert user and often recommends the app to his colleagues. PDF Expert allows him to be in charge of his files and have all the essential editing tools, which is crucial for his work and in his own words is a tool 'he could hardly do without it' to manage 3,000 volume digital library.

Join Vincent and thousands of other educators who use PDF Expert to customize learning materials, and empower students for success. Use our educational 50% discount and enrich your teaching toolkit this school year.