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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

PDF support?

It blows my mind how bad PDF support is in all of these notebook/data organizing apps (I'm looking at you OneNote) given how probably the vast majority of non-HTML digital documents are in PDF format.

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Apropos snipping data from PDFs:

Tabula is a tool for liberating data tables trapped inside PDF files (via a simple web interface) - source on github http://tabula.technology

previously discussed on hn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10021561

I was just looking up how to insert PDFs into one note and was shocked at how terrible it was. You have to do some bullshit Print to OneNote, which just inserts each PDF as a page in your section.

Just awful.

Evernote has very good PDF support but you need a premium subscription to make it actually useful. I clip PDFs to Evernote and annotate them all the time.

It's not very good. Not that stable in my experience and none of the cross-linking/tagging tools OneNote has.

I've been thinking about this a bit today[1], because I fear that Evernote is dying. I love and pay for Evernote, but they've been stagnant for years now. They're slowly adding features, but absolutely nothing that I care about.

As far as I can tell, there's really no functional equivalent to what Evernote does: a bucket you can throw data into and search for it later. OneNote probably comes closest from a purely note-taking standpoint, but it's missing some of the key features. This makes me a little nervous, as I now realize how reliant I am on a tool that I have very little confidence in.

[1] https://twitter.com/larrywright/status/643495960480509952

What features do you find missing in OneNote? Genuinely interested, as I use it intensely but don't use Evernote.

It does basic note taking and checklists and things pretty well (better than Evernote in some ways), but a frequent use case is creating a notebook with stuff in it (a mix of clipped web pages, notes, maybe documents), and then sharing it with someone. Also, it needs to be searchable. It's that part that OneNote seems weaker at.

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