For the most part I haven’t had issues doing this. I use PDF expert to annotate all of my larger pdfs on my ipad. To make sure that the annotations sync, I keep these pdfs in an icloud folder which I’ve indexed in Devonthink. That way my annotations show up on DTP on my laptop and on PDF expert on my iPad. I suppose I might run into problems if I then started to annotate the same PDFs on DTTG; however, I know not to do this.
The one issue that I’ve been noticing is that the free form highlighting does not always seem to work well between the two programs.
I recently reached out to Readdle regarding this issue. I summarized for them some of the background on this topic and included a link to this thread. I received the following response from their support team:
You’re totally right that it’s a known issue when integration doesn’t work correctly between PDF Expert and DEVONthink To Go. I’m afraid we haven’t fixed the issue in question, I’m sorry. Frankly speaking, we faced several issues when the newest version of PDF Expert was released. So, our developers have refocused all the resources to overcome the issues that interfere with the proper work of PDF Expert in general. Please rest assured once it’s fixed, I will inform you…
While it is still unclear if they can or will address the problem, their reply did give me some hope that it will be resolved eventually. Their response would seem to acknowledge that they are aware of the problem and that the issue is probably on their end since it does not seem to be limited to interoperability between PDF Expert and Devonthink since PDF Expert is having similar problems working with other apps.
Thanks for sharing this response with us. Sometimes people may think we’re passing the buck on an issue like this, so it’s nice to see a corraborating response from the third-party developer.
I reached out to Readdle and received the following reply:
Our technical team informed me that we faced another issue when the app freezes and crashes when you share the file from DEVONthink. This behavior influences the troubleshooting process of the issue you encountered initially when ‘open in doesn’t work correctly between PDF Expert and DEVONthink’.
Besides, our specialists double-checked the way other apps work when you share the files from DEVONthink and were able to reproduce the glitchy behavior there as well.
We would recommend contacting DEVONthink support so that they can verify the situation on their end.
I’m not holding my hopes up high that Readdle will ever fix this. The issue was reported to them over two years ago (I’ve also sent them numerous video captures and whatnot), and for the past year they have, understandably, had more pressing matters.
Still, as PDF Expert is not exactly cheap, it would have been nice for them to have fixed this or at least thoroughly investigated. I am now doing most of my annotations when needed in DTTG anyway.
We’d be more than happy to supply a TestFlight build to their developers. Please feel free to give them my email address for contacting me personally (see personal message).
Thank you, @eboehnisch. I’ll write back to Readdle right now. Hoping a “vendor meet” of sorts will be possible, so that the nagging issue will be resolved.
We’ve been in contact with Readdle years ago but more to the marketing side. On the development side we haven’t yet been able to establish a proper connection. Thank you for your efforts!
While not an activist by either nature or nurture, may I suggest that as many of us as possible write to Readdle directly? I sense a lack of incentive on their part to address this presumably “niche” issue.
