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Comment by black_puppydog | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

Actually yes

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.

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

>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... :(

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