I was having a hard time figuring out how to do annotations because the options weren’t in my toolbar, but once I figured out I needed to add the buttons I can now do them. First of… way cool feature. After about 3 seconds I realized that I will love this for wen I’m in a debate with a vendor over a bill. All my scraps of paper and post-it notes laying on my desk can now have a home.
I think i figured out the five options … circle, square, inline post-it, icon post-it, and url. And the highlight, strikethrough, underline make sense. On the bar with the hand, the “A”, and the square, I’m not sure what the square does.
The bigger question is that once you save the annotations, is it possible later on to delete them? I’m thinking about if I needed to print out a copy of the PDF. If its not possible to delete the annotations after saved, I’d suggest you add an option to the save dialog which would allow you to backup the original PDF file somehow. I am a little reluctant to annotate my archived originals if it permanently changes them.
Finally, is the text that is put in annotations searchable?
Thanks for continuing to make this an even better product.
Well you just solved the mystery. That little square thing on the button bar that I didn’t know what did… that’s how you select the annotations to move or delete them. Excellent… this is great stuff. I just continue to be amazed with DevonThink and how incredibly powerful this is.
First of all, I think the ability of annotating pdfs from within DT is great, and I love that you can read pdfs in full screen view (are there any plans of adding annotation capabilities in full screen view?).
My real question is if there are any plans to make annotated text searchable so that it will be used by the AI (and thereby the “See Also” feature)? As a musicologist, it would be extremely useful to be able to scan music scores into DT, and mark up these as pdfs. With music scores it is very cumbersome to take notes in a separate rtf document, and given the complexity of musical notation, one rarely gets good notes out of it. The idea of being able to easily find and compare notes across works and editions would any musicologists dream, and DT could become a must-have for researchers within this field.
If there are plans to do so, it would be nice to know, as I can already now begin to make annotations using this method, knowing that all the entered text will at some point become searchable.
You might also take a look at a different kind of annotation, using the smart template provided by Eric in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9434
By pressing a keyboard shortcut, that smart template will create a rich text note linked to the referenced document. You can make searchable annotations of a music score, and perhaps also link to a photograph of Jorja Fleezanis at a recording session.
This approach works with all file types, not just PDFs.
If you want to experiment, download and install the file provided by Eric’s first link, then download and install the revised template from the second link further down in the thread.
Another possibility is to put your manuscripts into Curio, annotate them there, and export the annotated file as a PDF. If you bring that PDF into DT the annotations are searchable by DT. OCRd PDF pages can be dragged into Curio, marked up, and brought back with all the text plus the annotations intact and searchable.
Some shortcomings: the vanilla Curio quicklook view is supported by DT and searchable (annotations are on an included RTF layer) but the page size is small and fixed. PDFS exported from Curio work best.
