Quote:
Originally Posted by binone
Thank you for your detailed response.
I wonder why they chose to not allow highlighting in pdf documents. Even the least functionally rich pdf readers support highlighting.
But more to the point, elipsa does not show any existing highlights in an imported pdf doc. It knows they are there. I.e if you go to the annotations section. Except that all annotations are shown as blank. It even jumps to the page where the highlights are supposed to be.
I think i could live with the pdf limitations *if* elipsa was consistent in also allowing a mechanism to export epub annotations.
Also, not sure if it is possible to copy an annotation and paste into a notebook for taking book notes.
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This will be long, but I’m clear of mind and I don’t believe I have shared this in too much detail in this forum before, so I’ll charge ahead.
The problem with exporting annotations from epubs is in how Kobo chose to enable annotation in epubs. They are bitmaps. I cannot emphasize enough what a puzzling and poorly conceived solution this was. Vector graphics would have been a more scalable solution. I discovered this issue first hand when I accidentally deleted a manuscript revision that had detailed annotations. Using various Linux and Mac undeleting apps gave me hundreds of bitmap files divorced from their anchor point or epub.
A bitmap of your scrawled annotation is created in snapshots as you write, like a flip book animation of you writing. The previous snapshots seem to be discarded, but not deleted.
If you change the font settings, the bitmap can no longer be properly displayed—as a rigid bitmap, it no longer matches the layout—so Kobo puts a marker there to help you see a preview and to restore the font settings if you choose. If you aren’t careful, you can have annotation markers everywhere from various font settings.
Unfortunately, text conversion is only available in Advanced Notebooks. This makes annotations valuable only for personal reasons on the specific ebook. Fortunately, the annotations are synced to Kobo’s cloud along with highlights and text notes you create, so if you need to restore your Elipsa, your annotations will be restored along with your purchased books.
This is what I discovered last year. I haven’t investigated to see if Kobo improved things, but from my observations, they haven’t. I also cannot recall if annotations, which are saved to the cloud, are restored for sideloaded books.
After the deletion fiasco, I stopped annotating in the margins entirely except for personal enjoyment. I moved to a shared PDF for editing and annotating using GoodNotes on my Mac & iPad. I haven’t tested if a shared PDF on Dropbox would sync properly if my coworker annotated the file. It’s worth exploring. In the meantime, Quoth is correct that text notes remain your only option for exporting.