Kindle Scribe pdf annotation and Devonthink

Hi there,

I wonder if anyone here is using Kindle Scribe for pdf annotations and then bringing the pdf’s into Devonthink after annotating the pdf? Are there issues with this (like Devonthink can’t read the pdf file from Kindle properly or extract information?) What would be the workflow with Scribe and Devonthink? Would other e-book readers do a better job?

Thanks :slight_smile:

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Last time I tried that, it didn’t worked as one can expect because Kindle “flats” the annotations in the PDF text before send via email to destination, then you get a PDF with your annotations, but not as annotations but as part of the text itself, even if they are handwritten. Then DT is not able to extract anything because the PDF does not have annotations metadata. Another issue is all annotations are black like the text.

That does not mean Amazon had changed something and now they are sent as annotations.

In my tests, what I did, was, after I read the document and exported into PDF, I loaded with PDF Expert, put in thumbnail view, select all pages with annotations and export those to a single PDF.

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As @rfog says, this will not work, as Scribe doesn’t handle annotations in a standard format and they’re not readable by other, third party, PDF handlers (including DevonThink).

For interest, Remarkable has the same issue. Boox and I believe Supernote devices both handle annotations in a standard format (I didn’t investigate Supernote thoroughly because the price in Europe is a bit :scream:).

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I can confirm that Boox devices use standard PDF annotation in their native viewer.

Yes, Boox (Note Air2) was the one that eventually made it to my shopping list, but I never committed to the purchase because I just want Apple to make an e-ink device, darn it :angry:

In the end, I just treated myself to an 12” iPad Pro instead and have customised the greyscale options. I’ve thus retained full compatibility with DTTG and any other apps I might want to use.

Still holding out hope for an Apple device though….

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