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Originally Posted by johnnyb
Hmm, but what restricts Kobo from letting the PDF Viewer make annotations to the file directly? As far as I can see, the “annotations view” is perfectly capable of extracting annotations made to the PDF and presenting them in the same way annotations made to epubs (which are then stored in the DB) are presented.
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Are you saying that the firmware does read the annotations in PDFs and add them to the annotations list, or that you think it should do it? I'm assuming the latter as a test I just did didn't show the annotations in a PDF in any way at all/
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So the question is: What keeps Kobo from not providing annotation tools for PDFs other than the usual “PDF not meant for small screens”, “only small fraction of users would use that” etc., all the while ignoring that users are actually requesting that feature? I mean, if Amazon does it on their Kindles (albeit in a different way, annotations are strictly “to database” in their PDF viewer), why wouldn't Kobo?
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The simplest answer to this question is "money". It will take money to add the function to the firmware, to test it and maintain it.
There is also an issue of the libraries they use. For PDF, Kobo uses Adobe RMSDK. If that doesn't support the annotations, then Kobo can't.
But, it probably comes down to how Kobo sees the product. If PDF annotations, be they internal or external, is not something they see is important to the direction of the product, then they won't see an importance to add it. And that's also where the small fraction of users" comes into play. If they add function that only a “only small fraction of users would use", they are ignoring the function that the rest of us would use. They have to set their priorities somehow and this is a reasonable way of doing it.
As a comment, this is the first time I can remember someone suggesting that the annotations in PDFs should be extracted into annotations list. Writing annotations back to the file (usually referring to epubs) has been suggested but only as a side-affect of asking where they are.
Note: I hope the above is how the priorities are set, or at least an important part of it. But, it is a lot more likely that some idiot in marketing had an idea, convinced their boss that it was a good idea and sell a lot more devices, and then they pushed it down everyone else's throats. So, if you want something done, you just need to find that marketing idiot, buy them a few drinks and ...