Editing a PDF in Google Drive

Support
1

I am trying to edit a PDF (paperpile publication) downloaded from Google Drive on Android (add annotations using a PDF editor app). I tried downloading, editing and then uploading (overwriting) the file, but the changes do not seem to be visible in PaperPile (although they are visible in Google Drive on the desktop). Is there anything I could do to get it to work?

2

This won’t work. If you upload a file manually to Google Drive there is no way for Paperpile to know that this file is a Paperpile file. For privacy reasons Paperpile does not even can see this file, it only can handle files that have been uploaded through Paperpile.

So the solution is to use a PDF annotator that supports (i) Google Drive and (ii) does it correctly. Unfortunately, I have to stress (ii) because some programs do exactly what you did, upload a new file instead of editing the existing. The forum is full of how this leads to missing or duplicated files.

At this point, we can recommend iAnnotate. I have not tested on Android but on iOS it correctly syncs the changes back to Google Drive so I’d assume the same for Android.

If anyone has experience with other programs that sync correctly to Google Drive, please post it here.

3

Thanks for the hints. I checked out Xodo PDF Editor that has nice support for annotations on Android and syncs to Google Drive. And indeed, the annotations get uploaded and when I click on the GDrive icon on the publication entry in Paperpile the updated PDF opens in google drive. However, clicking on the name of the PDF file opens a local cached copy which is not updated. How can I get that updated as well?

4

The cached version will be updated automatically next time the data gets synced which is at most 15 minutes after you made the changes.

5

The thing is that did not happen. After 24h the PDF file opened through the local link was still old, while the one opened using the GDrive icon was the updated one. I know that the publication still maintained ownership of the file since when I moved the publication to trash, the file was moved to trashed folder in google drive. Also, after that operation (moving to trash), the local file finally got updated.