[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Kicweed

I don't like sounding bitter, but honestly I am. The current experience of highlighting text, adding notes, and most importantly exporting them is so unreliable and unfriendly that it discourages me from reading the books I want. For me, half the process of reading a book is about keeping notes on what I'm reading.

1. Newly highlighted text is not saved

Any time that highlights have not been saved for me it is because of problems in the book. This most often happens when I put a book on the device a a kepub without first doing the transformation to kepub. There have been issues with the transformation that can cause issues with bookmarking, but, again, they tend to be issues in the source book that prevent the transformation from happening properly.

[*] Existing highlighted text is removed inexplicably from whole books (I've lost annotations from two finished books by now)

The only reason I can think of this happening is that you replaced the book on the device without making sure the book wasn't seen as a new book. In that case, the book details, including the annotations, are removed from the database and the book is added as a new book. This is intended be behaviour.

• Exporting annotations is a laborious and per-book process, requiring access to a PC
• Exported annotations are in an unstructured format, with minimum additional data (chapters, dates etc)
• Comments, requests and bug reports go unanswered by Kobo (in this forum, in GitHub and in Kobo's support channels). We're left trying to figure out things on our own and come up with hacky workarounds.

Firstly, as others have mentioned, MR is not an official support forum for Kobo devices. Kobo has absolutely no official presence here. And very little unofficial presence. The thread you posted in is simply a place for people to discuss changes they would like to see. Similarly, I think the Github repository is mainly there because of the open source licenses. For any changes they make, they will need to publish them. The annotations support is in nickel, with is proprietary software. The source for that isn't available. Raising issues on Github about nickel doesn't really make sense.

I did read your post. Honestly, you lost me with the title: "Improved Native Annotations Export". There is absolutely no official supported way of exporting annotations from a Kobo device. Hence, you cannot improve it. The method that is in the firmware was probably put there by a developer to help with testing. It might have been an experiment in what could be done. At this point, you just have to hope that Kobo doesn't decide to do a cleanup and remove it.

As it stands, I'm trying to find a way to take photos of my Forma's screen and OCRing them on my phone. To me it feels possibly more reliable than how things are currently supposed to work.

You can turn the screenshot function on and use those instead.

I've tried using @davidfor's excellent Annotations plugin via Calibre and it was great while it worked. Alas, at some point, something, somewhere went wrong and the process broke irreparably. I thought I'd be better off keeping it as simple as possible, avoiding any and all dependencies in my process. Still, not even the simplest, on-device workflows are reliable.

I checked your posts for any reports of issues. I am pretty sure that what you have reported has been fixed and released. I'm sure I worked out the sorting issue, but, I didn't include it in the release notes. Are you saying the current release doesn't work? Or maybe one of the beta's released since.

I only wish some of this frustration reaches someone at Kobo and they decide to do something about it.

If you want Kobo to do something, tell them. Tell them what you want and why. They do listen, and they do make changes based on what they are told.