I highlight text and take notes on a lot of PDFs on my iPad in Readdle, then would like to import those PDFs into DT on my Mac. When I do import them (by first moving the files via iTunes onto my Mac harddrive, then dragging to DT) the highlighted text is still visible in the DT version, but I can’t figure out how to access or view the notes. Are the notes not imported along with the PDF text? (The notes ARE visible when I open the PDF on my Mac in Adobe Reader.)
This is a question for Readdle. DEVONthink is using OS X’s standard methods for viewing PDFs and annotations, so if Readdle is doing something in their iOS app that is not consistent with OS X, then their support would be the ones to explain how to work around that.
Maybe I wasn’t clear. The Readdle notes on PDFs that I’m talking about are the same as the standard ones called Sticky Notes in Adobe Reader – and those notes don’t seem visible in PDFs I open in Devonthink, whether the notes were added in Readdle or Adobe (sticky notes added in Readdle are still visible when the PDF is opened in Adobe). (Weirdly, sometimes I briefly glimpse one of my sticky notes when I mouse over just the right word in the DT version of the PDF, but I can’t seem to see anything that flags the presence of a sticky note that was written in another program, or see those notes in a sidebar list, as in Adobe.)
I assume by “Readdle” you mean PDF Expert 5, the current iOS version of Readdle’s document manager. I just created a PDF Expert 5 document, moved it to the desktop, and imported it to DEVONthink Pro Office. The document has a sticky notation, square, circle, line, highlights, cross-out, underscore, text, and stamps. Each of these is editable in DEVONthink Pro Office. I open the document in its own window, where the PDF annotation tools appear on the toolbar. I click the tool appropriate to the annotation type (sticky, text, etc.) and then click that annotation, which can then be edited.
Toolbar:
Thanks for trying to help! I am in DT personal, 2.7.2, and though I can ADD all sorts of notes etc to a PDF created elsewhere (on iPad or in Adobe on my Mac) and those do show up in the sidebar, and are easy to edit, I can’t see where there are already sticky notes created in another program. If I happen to put my cursor over a place in the text where I know I had put a note via iPad, the note EVENTUALLY (after many seconds delay) appears in a little box hovering over the rest of the text, but I can’t see it in the sidebar, and I can’t access it to edit or copy it. Which means I can’t go into the PDF in DT, and look for all the notes I may have stuck to it as I was reading the PDF on the iPad.
I’m sure I’m doing something very obviously wrong … but I can’t figure out what!
I don’t know why you are having trouble revealing existing notes on PDFs.
However, if you select the PDF and press Shift-Command-O the document will open under the application that’s designated in the Finder as the “parent” app, in the case of PDFs, probably Preview.
Thanks, Bill. My goal was to stay within DT, to smooth out the process of making new DT notes from the notes added to the PDF while reading, but I guess I’ll give up on that goal!
@Blake, I’ve never seen the invisible-sticky-note problem in DEVONthink with any PDF annotated in any iOS app – and because of my endless CRIMPing I’ve tried them all 
Perhaps if you send Support a few examples of misbehaving PDFs they can confirm or advise if they see a problem, too. These things are almost impossible to diagnose in a forum.
Thanks, as always, Korm, for your great advice. (I’m such a newbie to DT that I don’t even know what CRIMPing is!) I will contact Support.
Any thoughts on what the best introductory book might be for me to read to get more deeply connected to DT? There’s a good one for Evernote, and wondering if there’s an equivalent for DT…