Papers Support Forum

Some important notes regarding the new annotations features in Papers for iPad:

- Annotations are stored locally on the iPad, even if you remove a paper and then bring it back to the iPad (if you sync with different settings for example) the notes and highlights should stay present as long as you a) don't change the PDF for another version and b) you don't remove the Papers app altogether.

- Due to limitations in what Apple offers in the SDK to 3rd party developers, annotations are not yet embeddable into the PDF itself. This means that it's not yet possible to export or email a PDF that contain your highlights. We're working on a solution.

- Papers for Mac doesn't yet support annotations, hence annotations are not yet synced to your Mac. This is in the works. One of the reasons is that this has taken very long already is that it requires a complete rewriting of the foundation of the Mac app (we obviously learned from this for the iPad app when we started this project). In other words we first have to do some significant changes to the app first before we can even start thinking about annotations, the good news is however that that's well underway and that once in place a lot of the missing key features should be possible to be added in quick succession.

- If you encounter any PDFs for which highlighting doesn't work (while you can select text in for example Preview on the Mac) please send an example to us so we can make these work as well. We are aware that for some PDFs this is currently the case.

- Annotations and notes don't yet work on the iPhone. Given the lower resolution this is less trivial, however this is not true for the iPhone4 obviously. In short, we do plan on adding both highlighting and notes to the iPhone4, and only notes to all other iPhone models in a future update.

Highlighting, copying, pasting, and noting all work fine. A dream come true. This is a huge step forward and make this application even more indispensable. Getting annotation to sync with Papers on a desktop computer will be a tough nut to crack given the limitations imposed by Apple, but this really is as good as it gets. Great work mekentosj! The only thing lacking is the option to SCROLL vertically, as in the desktop version, rather than turn pages. This would be very useful.

Last edited by crispinbates (2010-07-25 08:35:52)

I had a paper on my ipad and took notes with the new version and want to give the notes to a colleague. How do I do that? When I synched the paper to my laptop I got the paper but not the notes?

@rjs from the post just a few above yours:

- Due to limitations in what Apple offers in the SDK to 3rd party developers, annotations are not yet embeddable into the PDF itself. This means that it's not yet possible to export or email a PDF that contain your highlights. We're working on a solution.

mek wrote:

Yes, those apply to iAnnotate as well but apparently they have invested a lot of energy and effort/time into getting this to work.

I understand why you as a company try to incorporate annotations into Papers as well, especially as there seems to be a high demand for this functionality. However, as you say yourself, modifying the PDF itself is a difficult task on the iPad, so I fear that annotations made in Papers on the iPad will be only be visible in Papers on OSX in the future. I would find such a tie-in with Papers less than optimal, because there are plenty of colleagues who are not using Papers.

In the meanwhile, may I suggest the following: Since the application state is already saved when exporting a paper to iAnnotate (i.e., you get back to the just exported paper when closing iAnnotate and opening Papers again), would it not be possible upon receiving a PDF in Papers to ask the user whether to create a new entry or to replace the existing PDF of the currently opened entry? This way, it would be easy to export a PDF to iAnnotate, make the annotations, and send the PDF back to Papers. Also, this solution seems to be rather easy to program.

Joachim

I like the sound of Joachim's suggestion. The annotation features of the new Papers version are not nearly as complete or easy to use as those of iAnnotate, which I suspect will be hard to replicate. One nice feature of the iAnnotate approach is that it is easy to share annotated PDFs with others. While Papers-iAnnotate-Papers is less than ideal, it seems to be the quicker fix than adding full annotation to Papers; at the very least it would be a nice alternative. (As an aside, I am very happy with the iPad-Mac sync, even though I have had a few issues...but I would love to have a good way to sync my Mac Pro my MacBook Pro...I kept getting error messages with the Dropbox approach some have suggested.)