Annotating PDF...again (but good news this time.)

[doubledge]

As a new user I’ve been reading all the posts about the difficulty in annotating PDFs…specifically in terms of having your annotations be searchable. Well I have done some test and found out that the PDF program that I use does not have this issue. It’s called PDFPen. When I make annotations in PDFPen, they are found and highlighted when I do a search in DTP.

Hopefully this is good news for others as it was for me!

It goes with saying that I would still like to see many of the already noted suggestions in regard to annotations of all kinds. This seems to me that it should be one of the strongest elements of DTP. I look forward to the next version.

[korm]

This is a good tip. Thanks.

The downside is that PDFpen annotations do not seem to be compatible with other standard apps (I’ve experimented here with Acrobat and Skim). It seems they are not selectable or editable in either of those apps and Skim won’t convert the annotations to/from Acrobat format. The annotations are viewable, but not searchable in DTTG. (At least they are viewable )

[doubledge]

@korm

The downside is that PDFpen annotations do not seem to be compatible with other standard apps (I’ve experimented here with Acrobat and Skim). It seems they are not selectable or editable in either of those apps and Skim won’t convert the annotations to/from Acrobat format.

Agreed and I suspect the reason is that the annotations are placed on the text layer and not the annotation layer. They should be accessible to OCR though.

I have to say that I started using PDFPen as a replacement for Skim. It has a lot of great features for a relatively small price tag.

@korm

The annotations are viewable, but not searchable in DTTG. (At least they are viewable )

The annotations I made in PDFPen were searchable in DTP so I wonder why they are not in DTTP? Seems like a step in the right direction though and maybe with a little tweeking Devon Tech can make them searchable in DTTG. (Not so subtle hint)

[korm]

Here’s a PM I received from Smile support on the question of Acrobat and Skim recognizing PDFpen text-based annotations. It confirms @doubledge’s latest post, above.

@Smile Software

PDFpen does support Acrobat style annotations via Note and Comment objects. It’s these that DEVONthink does not search. If you use the text object in PDFpen, it’s half way between annotations and adding text to the document. Most applications will see it as regular text, so it will be searchable, but an application that only edits Acrobat style annotations will not be able to edit those as they are as good as adding text to the document. Acrobat Pro can edit them, of course, as it can edit any text. The problem is really DEVONthink, and also SpotLight searching in OS X, both of which ignore Acrobat style annotations. PDFpen will search both text and Acrobat style annotations in its search function.