New PDF Annotator Public Beta 🖍

In addition to “page width” I’d love to have a “text width” option. When the sidebars are open on my laptop the page margins take up too much space, making the text small, but if you were to judge the width of the text itself it could go much wider…

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That’s an interesting idea. Thanks for the suggestion.

  1. #bug #prio:2: If I click Ctrl+C to copy the current selection, then the selection gets unselected and instead everything after it becomes selected, ergo the rest of the document. This is an annoyance in my workflow when I copy and highlight important passages, since I have to un/seleceted multipe times. Certainly this behavior is not expected.

Request: could the export annotation window have a “copy to clipboard” button as well as a “download” button? (Dynalist has this.) Thanks!

When using the PDF annotator, closing my computer, and coming back again later it often says “offline” and many features are disabled. There is no way to click the “offline” indicator to force it to attempt to reconnect. The only thing I can do is refresh the browser, which causes me to loose my place and my settings (zoom, etc.). Please improve the ability to reconnect after going offline. Thanks!

Same here, this is also kinda similar to this problem with the Gdocs add-on I recently reported: Reloading Gdocs-page after standby?

Also this is sadly one of the biggest downsides of Paperpile, basically its Achilles’ heel.
I also often travel by train and there I’ll have a unreliable connection.
So the reader will switch to offline mode at some point, disabling the annotation features.
And to resume as stated you have to reload the page and it will not have saved the state obviously.

Can’t you just wrap the app in Electron or something, one of your competitors seems to have done just this with their recently released desktop app for offline functionality :wink:

One major difference between exporting annotations in PDF Expert vs. PaperPile PDF Annotator Public Beta is paragraph wrapping. PP seems to add line breaks at the end of many lines, forcing me to run regex scripts to reflow the paragraphs, while I don’t have this problem in PDF Expert.

A note about OPML export. For me it is not really ideal to have notes grouped by page. The main advantage of having notes in OPML format is being able to organize them in an outliner according to the structure of the paper. Having them already organized as child elements of the page they were on makes that much harder. Ideally for me would be to have the page element and paper title saved as a “note” in each item, so that they move around with the item as I organize my outline.

I’ve made a sample outline with each of the different ways of organizing annotations illustrated:

https://dynalist.io/d/q7Mfepij3KnAPFt6BjvCLHQT

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We are looking into the issues. The _note field does not seem to be a standard OPML field, but it seems to be a good solution.

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Copying this here from another thread as I’ve realised this is the more appropriate place for feature requests:

It would be really useful to be able to customise what information is exported when you print/export PDF annotations. Specifically, for me, the ability to get rid of the annotation author, date and time would be useful as it is superfluous when I am simply annotating a PDF by myself rather than collaborating.

Also the ability to export into a .doc file (or a google doc) would be appreciated - the text export is useful but this does not include screengrabs in it. My workflow involves collating my notes on a series of PDFs into one word document to review, and I am finding it difficult to make this work smoothly with Paperpile despite being quite impressed with the product overall.

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I also realized that this is maybe the best forum to talk about feature requests for the pdf annotator. I really would like to have a feature in the reader similar to what has been recently implemented in the elsevier reader

Basically, when I click on the references in the main text, I would like to have a small pop-up or window which shows me the details about this publication, similar to the what I described in the feature request above. Would be awesome if this would be possible.

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My workaround is that if I am working with a paper where I anticipate I will be snowballing from, I open the paper in two tabs (duplicate tab once you have opened the PDF reader), and in the second tab I display the references so I can quickly pull up a reference of interest by switching to the second tab, highlighting the reference title, then right click and search google.

It would be nice if by clicking on a citation from within a PDF a small window would pop up with the full citation, without having to go to the bottom of the document and then having to go back to the text.

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Bug Report: Thank you very much for the great PDF annotator. I very much appreciate the Paperpile mentality of keeping annotations in the native Adobe format. One issue I noticed was that when I import PDF’s that already have annotations in them, some of the highlights seem to be shortened on the left side, like the highlight rectangle boundaries are being misinterpreted. Here is a screenshot of the original document and what it looks like in the annotator.

Bug Report 2: Also, if I then take one of these PDFs and either view it in Google Drive or use the “save to disk” option to save the file, the comment bubbles get blown up and appear very large. (Image in reply)

Hi, one more feature request. Our team shares PDFs, but some of us have read the papers several times, some are new to the paper/topic. It would be great to be able to toggle annotations on/off in the PDF viewer, and as an extended ask, to be able to see (and hide) other users annotations that have sharing permissions for the file.
Thanks!

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+1
I agree! Sometimes people want to see the “fresh” pdf. Also it could be awesome if you can hide annotations by other people and keep visible only yours…
It could be even cooler if you can toggle annotation on and off by username.

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Having increasing issues with PDFs failing to load pages as I scroll through, often needing a refresh to solve but sometimes not even solved with multiple refreshes. Example of what I see (all further pages in the PDF are the same as the second one here)

Hi
I love the PDF Annotator. I have some feature requests that would further improve the experience:

  • It would be great if the annotation window would jump to the part the new annotation is added. For long documents with many annotations it can be difficult to find the newest annotation when I add it in the middle of the document.

  • It would be great if it would be possible to add your own text inbetween the comments/highlights. This would allow far more freedom how to use the annotator. One could structure the annotations (with headings?) or even create complete summaries of a document already in the annotator. A similar feature is available in Mendeley (only online), although their annotator is less powerful.

  • It would be really useful if the annotations could be searched within the main page of Paperpile. If you for example have a lot of literature and you want to find a specific paper that had the information you are looking for, you could then just simply search withing all annotations. A similar feature is implemented in Sciwheel. There, all the annotations are also available to read in the main page of the reference manager and are searchable.

Thanks in advance!

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Has anyone else noticed some “softness” in the PDFs text?

At first I thought I was imagining things or that I needed an ophtalmologist appointment. But opening the same PDF, at similar scale in Foxit Reader, Paperpile and Chrome (through the paperpile option) the text seem less sharp in the paperpile tool. I am not sure why, maybe some specific config?

besides that, Im loving it, became my main PDF annotating tool and I have been recommending a lot!