try67

There is. It's called "Comments". Go to the Comments menu and click the Show Comment & Markup Toolbar. Then try the different commenting tools and see which one does what you need. I think the Sticky note is more-or-less what you want. You can set different options as to how it looks and behaves from the Options menu of the comment and more general options under Edit-Preferences-Commenting.

arthur_cadeaux

Thanks, but I already tried the Comments tools and found them wanting. As far as I can tell, all of them would cover part of the document, which defeats the purpose. If there's a way to use Comments without doing this, please let me know.

What I'd really like is a separate text area that appears below or to the side of the page, can be open or shut as needed, and does not cover any part of the document itself, similar to PowerPoint's Notes view (one of the very few things to like about that program).

The closest thing to this that I find on Acrobat is the bookmark function, so I'll go with that for now.

try67

If you make a sticky note you can move it away from the actual page to the gray (or black, in some versions) background.