It’s been a long time since I tried using DevonThink to highlight my PDFs. A few years ago I found PDF Expert was more fully featured and had a more seamless experience. However, Readdle just announced a subscription model which seems fair for more of the robust features like collaboration functions. But for simple highlighting and comments in the margin that price is a bit much. So, how’s the ease of highlighting in DevonThink To Go these days? It looks relatively simple so far, and seamless. Is there any quirk that I should be aware of before I completely move my workflow over?
Far as I’ve seen, the features you’re looking for are still available for free in PDF Expert 7.
That said, I’ve used both PDF Expert 6 and DTTG in recent studies, and found myself sticking with DTTG most of the time. The PDFs were stored in DT databases anyway, and PDF Expert seemed to handle that poorly (it seemed like the app refreshed the file every so often, which kicked me out of the annotation tool I was using, forcing me to do a few extra taps to get back into my “reading mode”).
I can’t recall any major workflow adaptations when switching between PDF Expert and DTTG.
I just upgraded my v6 PDF Expert to v7. I did go into settings and invoked the command to reinstall in-app purchases (I’m not on my Mac now so I may not have the correct command). I can do highlighting in multiple colors and other features that were in v6 Pro.
Hmm. V. 6 and 7. I am running Version 2.4.28 (636) on my Mac. Non-subscription.
Can anyone explain?
TY
doclrb
Sorry, I’m referring to iOS and not Mac. My mistake there. and yes for v 7 I can do highlighting after having clicked on Restore purchases in settings.
I do a lot of highlighting and annotating of PDFs. Since I discovered the ability to list the highlights/annotations in DT I switched to only using DT and DTTG to annotate PDFs. Not that it can’t list PDF Expert’s annotations but I find the ones I made using DT products were always listed w/o issues where the PDF Expert annotations were sometimes screwed up.
I don’t know the PDF Expert people, but I’m willing to bet the subscription change wasn’t done out of greed but survival. Ultimately the market will dictate if the $ is worth it. Most users can just use the built in mark-up in IOS and OSX. Some may decide the extra functionality or convenience is worth the money. Software is a hard business. Personal software is even harder.
Is the ability to list the highlights/annotations in DT a feature of DT 3? Can these be exported?
One of the big problems is that DTG has been relatively neglected and needs some love (one can’t highlight text, for example).
Is the ability to list the highlights/annotations in DT a feature of DT 3?
Yes, this is a feature of DEVONthink 3.
Can these be exported?
It’s unclear in what way but look at Tools > Summarize Highlights.
One of the big problems is that DTG has been relatively neglected and needs some love (one can’t highlight text, for example).
DEVONthink To Go has not been neglected. It is on a different development cycle as DEVONthink 3 and we have marshalled our resources toward getting 3 to a gold master public release.
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I fully understand the problem of limited resources.
That being said, DTG hasn’t had even a maintenance release in 7 months.
The new features in DT3 are great, but unfortunately I use an iPad for reading and annotating PDFs, so they’re not particularly useful to me.
IMHO Devon has always seemed more like a Mac OS than an iOS shop.
I, too, am eager to see the DT3 polish show up on iPhone and iPad. That said, DTTG provides a great annotation app and Files provider—I’m able to deal with my PDFs (and webarchives, an underrated benefit of DEVONtech tools!) on iOS and take advantage of DT3’s powers when I get to the desktop.
We’ll see how much better that’ll get once attention can turn to iOS again.
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