Recently I’ve had issues viewing annotations made offline in the Paperpile PDF viewer. I currently read and annotate offline in Xodo - the annotations (highlights, pen notes, comments) turn up in google drive online - this confirms the file is syncing … however … when I open the file on Paperpile in the native PDF viewer for Chrome, I do not see the annotations made offline in Xodo.
This was never an issue. I’ve tried on a few different computers and the issue persists. I can only fix it if I re-upload the pdf to the individual reference which is a pain. Once I lost two chapters of annotations because of sync issues between devices - I read a lot in places where there is no internet so the auto-saving to local disk, with Google Drive updating it once back on line, is a vital feature I need for my work flows.
Has there been any updates on this? I have been using PaperPile for a few years (great product, thanks!). I recently bought an e-ink tablet and want to read/hand write notes on my papers.
Like Jess, after writing my notes on my tablet I can see the notes in the Google Drive viewer on my laptop, but in the PaperPile PDF viewer I do not see my notes.
Interestingly, some small dots and pieces of the notes sometimes are visible in the PDF viewer, but nothing that is useful. I guess PaperPile’s PDF viewer is doing something under-the-hood that is removing 99% of the notes?
My work-around for now is to just change the default PDF viewer to Google Drive and skip PaperPile’s viewer all-together.
This issue continues to be ongoing for myself without resolution. Currently I download what I am reading storing it on the desktop (at least onedrive is backing it up now). Then I delete the PDF from paperpile as to prevent conflicts and confusions. Once I have read it and transferred my notes I upload it back to paperpile then check I can see the annotations. Once this is done I then delete the downloaded file.
The volume of unnecessary steps here is daunting - moreover I am in the last phases of my PhD and the nearly 8 years of papers an annotations I collected via paperpile are frighteningly fragile.
It would be great if someone from the team would respond as this issue arose over a year ago and has yet to be addressed.
While I resolve things with Jess directly, I wanted to write down the current state of this feature. There are some things Google does that prevent us from having a full and proper support for it, but it generally should work - if it does not (and is not one of the cases below) please write to us on support@paperpile.com and reference this forum post.
Annotations made in Xodo
This should generally work. We will check your Google Drive after you make one of various operations within your Paperpile Library (e.g. you Star a publication). In addition there is an explicit trigger in “Settings > Data and files > Resync”, but it should not be necessary.
Annotations made in Google Drive viewer online
Here Google does not let us know there was an annotation until you Download a file within the Google Drive online UI. After downloading and triggering any action (like above), you should see your annotations propagate to Paperpile.
Annotations made in Google Drive Android app
Here it seems Google bakes in the annotations directly to the PDF as a layer that is not a standard annotation (I will call this “baked PDF”). As such we can’t extract these annotations and they keep on being baked into the PDF. We take this “baked PDF” version from Google Drive and start using it as a “new default PDF version”, so e.g. if you make and annotation within Paperpile and then check your Google Drive, you should see the new “baked PDF” version + your new annotation from Paperpile added.
Currently the “baked PDF” version is not being showed in Paperpile when you open Paperpile PDF viewer. You can go to “Settings > Data and files > Clear all local files” to force Paperpile to see the “baked PDF” version within Paperpile PDF viewer.