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Draw on a PDF Online

goodannotations.com

47 pointsperrys27 comments

Content warning: strong language

I literally just spent an hour trying out different apps on a windows pc to annotate a scientific paper (standard arxiv paper) with a stylus.

The results are devastating... Every app is so broken, hidpi isn't there, font rendering is crap, touch on windows is essentially unusable, many apps didn't even let me un-fullscreen without going back to desktop mode (this is a convertible).

I surmise that the "upload your pdf and do the editing in the cloud" market only exists because the user story on windows is utter shit. It is so much worse than on debian, running on the same hardware. This includes the touch screen and stylus handling, font rendering, UI, responsiveness, essentially everything that people always claim linux is so bad at.

I'm not comparing it to apples's golden cage of course, they may have amazing pdf editing but I'm not interested.

>It is so much worse than on debian

I feel you. What DID you end up using on Debian then?

https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp

Not perfect but so much more workable than what I saw here.

Also much more workable on linux than on windows... :|

Edit: I had written "sadly much more workable on linux than on windows" but honestly I don't think it's sad at all.

xournal has builds available for windows. I just showed my wife how to sign a pdf her laptop last night (the only windows machine in the house).

I tried that (well, xpurnalpp, not xournal) and the stylus/touch story didn't compare to the Debian experience at all... :(

If you haven't tried Microsoft Edge then it's worth a shot. Curious to know if you have used it and how it compared to other applications.

Does Microsoft Edge have annotation tools built in?

Edge has built in tools for drawing on and highlighting a pdf file.

That might be the single reason to actually try it. Now, if only there was a way to strip out all the web browsing functionality and not have it take the attention as an invitation to nest into my system even more... :P

> I'm not comparing it to apples's golden cage of course, they may have amazing pdf editing...

Actually yes

Hey! Your absolutely right, Apple has got down an awesome native PDF editor & annotator and that Windows do not have their act together for native apps.

The direction Good Annotations is taking however is to be able to do all of that collaboratively with other users. The stuff you see today is hopefully the first step.

Device compatability is obviously a tough one because there are so many different devices out there creating alot of edge cases. At the moment we're following the data to get things off the ground. Chrome & Desktop. We will be looking at touch support in the near future

How does such a ubiquitous format have such terrible and disjointed editing tools in this day and age?

I had the exact same experience. It's intolerably bad on Windows.

Can you give me an idea of what worked well with Debian? I hadn't even considered that as an option.

I've been using Zotero + xournalpp (note the "pp") and it works quite well. I wouldn't call it perfect, but I'm happy enough. It handles pinch to zoom, swipe to pan, and stylus for annotations.

Ubuntu studio worked best for my touchscreen laptops. Only distro I found that handled things well.

I created a similar service Kontxt (https://kontxt.io) that converts PDFs to websites with Google Doc like shareable controls and inline annotations: highlights, comments (with @mentions & deep-links to page-parts), polls, and auto-scroll navigation.

Somewhat off-topic: Although in this particular case I use Preview on a Mac, this task is in the general category of tasks where every once in a while I need an app to do a slightly unusual thing. I might, say, need something like this once every two weeks, but never the exact same task more than a couple times a year.

Unfortunately, the naive method for one-off finding a rarely used function like this is Googling, but the Google results are SEO'ed to death. The top results are invariably more broken and ad-invested than the best thing out there, but the latter is hard to find.

Any suggestions? By far the most useful tool I've found for this is https://alternativeto.net/, but it often doesn't have what I need.

If one wants to keep one's privacy and use desktop software, then I can recommend Ocular, which is developed by KDE (think Plasma for Linux): https://okular.kde.org

* It's cross platform (not just for Linux) * Can read and markup/highlight: PDF, Postscript, DjVu, CHM, XPS, ePub and others.

I use it as an e-book reader for mostly books in PDF format. There are better e-book readers, but Ocular meets my needs of highlighting and taking notes in the PDF. Admittedly, Ocular seems to have some limitations with ePub files.

I forgot to mention that Ocular is free (no cost). The Dev team also provides related software that is referenced in the link already provided:

* Evince

* Free Software PDF readers

* Poppler

* DjVuLibre

Does this involve uploading your potentially private PDF file? If so, do people really feel comfortable doing that?

If so, this reminds me of free internet fax services where you upload documents you want to fax to their servers, and they make a local call to fax them to their destinations. Most of what I have to fax these days is to doctors and lawyers. Why on earth would I want to upload such sensitive data to some businesses servers where they can do god knows what with it?

Also https://www.pdfescape.com/

Unfortunately, neither of the two is free software.

Good Annotations is completely free :)

You can implement your own with canvas and PDFjs ... I did something back in the day with latex and java (yikes) ... but anything is possible ... now I would try socket.io whiteboard example so many could destroy the same PDF

Yep this is how I implemented it on Good Annotations. I used PDFjs to render the PDF as an image data string. I'll checkout socket.io but my understanding of socket.io is that it is websocket technology so i'm not totally sure what you mean.

Something i do want to figure out is server side rendering the PDF vs the client, because I beleive there is a lot of data lost using PDFjs i.e. signatures

Free of charge != Free Software :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

I see a lot of complaints on this thread and those complaints lead me to believe you guys haven't tried the outstanding Drawboard PDF.

Can't handle multi-page documents properly. You have to enter the page number, after uploading the doc and you can only annotate that single page.

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