After lurking around this great forum for a couple of months and being inspired by a number of great ideas, I decided to share some of my findings regarding the export and embedding of hand-written annotations (so far, I've only played with simple pdf-files).
For my first tests, I decided to stick with Windows as operating system and tried to avoid to install a lot of additional software.
Already on my computer:
LibreOffice (for its "export to pdf" functionality), PDF24 (a tool to merge pdf files, something similar should work too), Inkscape (vector graphics editing)
Additional installs:
SQLiteSpy (reading of Sony's books.db), NoteToSvg
What I tried:
For testing purposes I made a simple pdf file (
Scribble Test - original.pdf) with LibreOffice Writer and transferred it to the PRS-T1. I added a few free-hand annotations (see
and
) to the file on the reader and then connected the reader again with my computer.
With SQLiteSpy I looked for the id of the free-hand annotations in books.db and exported the respective files in /Sony_Reader/database/cache/books/BOOK_ID/markup with NoteToSVG.
Then I opened both the first page of the pdf file and the svg file with Inkscape, grouped all elements of the svg and copied the illustration to the window with the pdf (for some reason I had to resize the graphic, so it might be a good idea to mark two corners when annotating on the reader to facilitate aligning). I saved the file as pdf and did the same with the second page.
Both pages were merged with PDF24. As you can see, the resulting pdf file (
Scribble Test - annotated pages.pdf) doesn't look too bad - simple text is fine but there are some obvious problems with equations (that were not properly imported by Inkscape). However, it's too much time and effort to do this for complete textbooks or even epubs.