Wish list for future Scribe updates

[tomsem]

PDF Markup

• add Shape, Strikethrough, Underline, Sticky Note, Text box, and Text tools (text would be indexed and searchable) [note that PDF Sticky Notes can be placed anywhere on the page, so that should be the behavior for Print Replica -- should not allow anchoring them to text or image]
• when exporting to PDF ('Share document'), return the original PDF with Scribe annotations mapped to PDF annotations
  

Print Replica

• enable page animation, improve performance
• enable 9 thumbnail view
• generate cover thumbnail from first page of PDF
• add 2 column (facing pages) option to Landscape
• Kindle Store access to all Print Replica titles
• add handwriting transcription to export of Notes for copy/paste
• Export all Pen annotations directly to a Notebook for editing

Notebook

• add Shape and Text tools (text would be indexed and searchable)
• add more templates, including wide aspect templates and use landscape UI for these
• manage templates (to hide those not used, or reveal others not turned on by default)
• add Download All to folder options (to complement Remove all downloads)
• ability to change template on individual pages
• custom templates, perhaps via special folder like /fonts. It would take image of certain dimensions, or maybe page of PDF and add Custom menu to access them.
• create labelled (searchable) bookmarks

Sticky Notes

• add Shape and Text tools (text would be indexed and searchable)
• add handwriting transcription to exported Notes for copy/paste
• add ability to have multiple Sticky Note 'pages': the panel is pretty small
• export all Sticky Notes to Notebook

Pen

• add Undo, Lasso to choices
• allow customization of eraser action

Other

• long press in any corner from any context brings up Recent items list for quicker task switching, with Home, Library, Notebooks, Store links (do this for all Kindles)
• Lasso tool option to capture a selected screen region to clipboard and Paste to notebook.
• Deliver personal documents in Print Replica format instead of PDF for all updatable Kindles and the Kindle apps, so they will sync reading position and annotation across the platform
• Improve palm rejection to reduce accidental page turns, activation of hyperlinks etc.
• Ability to make pen annotations to any fixed layout format (e.g. comics), not just Print Replica.
• (Notebook and page markup) Share single page
• Move a personal document from Library to Notebooks so you can use folders to group it with Notebooks etc. And of course be able to move it back to Library. Alternatively provide Add to Notebook Folder option in addition to Add to Collection for any content.
• Add quick setting to disable sleep timer for current session. Ten minutes is not enough for some applications (sheet music/fake book chart, recipes, note taking during meeting or lecture)

This was a post the on latest Scribe update thread but creating dedicated thread for more focussed discussion and updating as new updates arrive.

9Jun2023: updated list of PDF annotations, add note about accidental page turns
11Jun2023: updated to add 'pen annotations for any fixed layout format', custom notebook templates, share a single page, include personal documents in Notebooks view
16Jun2023: 'more templates'
10Jul2023: Exported Print Replica documents now preserve text and page links; still need annotations converted to PDF annotations.
26Jul2023: Add sleep timeout option
31Jul2023: create bookmarks with searchable labels in Notebooks.

[Futuregrace]

Disable screen for just reading or even better if you could disable finger touch, but pen touch still work

[Quoth]

Enable direct marking of real PDFs with pen and copy back.
Use of pen/annotations without having to connect to Amazon at all.
Local handwriting conversion.
Ability to edit Collections and Series without Amazon. Collections are a bit broken and Series is immutable, defined by often wrong Amazon listing.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Futuregrace

Disable screen for just reading or even better if you could disable finger touch, but pen touch still work

This is the Oasis feature, where you need to use buttons or swipe to turn pages?

For some reason, I thought all Kindles running 5.15.1.1 had this feature, but of the Kindles I have that are, only the 10th generation Paperwhite has this feature. I've never found use for it.

If they brought this to Scribe would that be good enough?

When reading Print Replica finger taps in page turn zones do not turn pages unless toolbar is set to Select. Part of palm rejection I think. You must use finger swipe to turn pages. And is mostly in this context where I get accidental page turns. I need to observe more before proposing solution.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Enable direct marking of real PDFs with pen and copy back.
Use of pen/annotations without having to connect to Amazon at all.
Local handwriting conversion.
Ability to edit Collections and Series without Amazon. Collections are a bit broken and Series is immutable, defined by often wrong Amazon listing.

It seems pretty clear none of these things are on Amazon's roadmap. They take as given that people will trust them with private data, etc.

What is possible without their help?

It is possible now to create Notebooks without connection to Amazon, and to export these to FXL ePub (courtesy of @jhowell's work on KFX Input plugin). Pen annotations can be exported as well. Some scripting is needed to make it more convenient (I'm hoping to make some progress on this).

For handwriting OCR, maybe one of these projects would help:
https://github.com/topics/handwritte...ition?l=python

One might envision a round trip from PDF to PR KFX and back, with the end result being actual PDF annotations on the original PDF, without hitting Amazon services.

But the roadblocks are several: conversion to PR KFX is manual (Kindle Create has no CLI), and who (in their right mind) will write code to covert directly?

Then need to figure out how to gather up the annotations. The Pen annotations can be extracted to SVG via KFX Input plugin, and highlights/notes/bookmarks can be exported to JSON. Need to figure out how to map them to the right locations in the PDF and convert them to PDF annotations. It's not trivial, but it seems feasible.

But if I'm right Amazon will deliver this through their services in a couple of months, and most people will be perfectly happy to use these.

Collections and Series are long standing issues for side-loading and are not Scribe specific, not in scope here.

[aceflor]

Originally Posted by tomsem

When reading Print Replica finger taps in page turn zones do not turn pages unless toolbar is set to Select. Part of palm rejection I think. You must use finger swipe to turn pages. And is mostly in this context where I get accidental page turns. I need to observe more before proposing solution.

That. It’s annoying and I hope it’s not that difficult to fix…

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by aceflor

That. It’s annoying and I hope it’s not that difficult to fix…

Yes, it's one of the few things that got a little worse with the latest update. My palm will now sometimes accidentally select text, which was not possible before.

[HLS]

I am not hopeful on any real changes to the scribe since Amazon is geared to reading and not productivity

[rff1013]

A top feature I'd like to see added is the ability to lock orientation. It's quite annoying to set down my Scribe and have the page flip upside down. It's not a showstopper, but it's an irritant.

[tomsem]

I've been looking at PDF support in some of Scribe's competitors: ReMarkable 2, Boox Note Air 2, Kobo Elipsa (YouTube overviews). I had thought they would include more annotation tools (like the average desktop and tablet PDF apps would) but in that respect, only the Note Air 2 has more than Scribe (looked like underline, strikeout).

The critical deficiency of Scribe is not on device PDF features, but with the conversion services. On the way in, you lose any existing PDF annotations, and on the way back, all you get is a visual representation, without any actual PDF annotations.

It's not clear what the other devices do with existing annotations of a type which they cannot create (Shape, strikethrough etc.). So they may have limitations there as well. But at least the end result is not 'lossy': it's the original PDF with annotations added to it.

[Quoth]

The Elipsa & reMarkable allow markup on PDF just like on paper with a pen.
Additionally, you can number the highlights and have a companion Notebook (easy to swap back and forth on Elipsa or Sage), and unlike reMarkable the Kobos can do local conversion of entry to text, equations, shapes and checkboxes.
I have the Sage & Elipsa, but gave away the reMarkable as it's so totally inferior in many areas.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Quoth

The Elipsa & reMarkable allow markup on PDF just like on paper with a pen.
Additionally, you can number the highlights and have a companion Notebook (easy to swap back and forth on Elipsa or Sage), and unlike reMarkable the Kobos can do local conversion of entry to text, equations, shapes and checkboxes.
I have the Sage & Elipsa, but gave away the reMarkable as it's so totally inferior in many areas.

Thanks for the details.

That's nice on the Kobos, I wondered why there were no toolbars. And do the converted objects get mapped to corresponding PDF annotations?

Wish I could play with one for a few minutes but will probably have to settle for finding some more video reviews that go over this stuff.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by tomsem

That's nice on the Kobos, I wondered why there were no toolbars. And do the converted objects get mapped to corresponding PDF annotations?

The Kobo Sage / Elipsa /Elipsa 2 is like two separate products. The Advanced Notebooks export Word, HTML or plain text. Word format export allows any mix of handwriting, converted text, check boxes (which can be ticked later), conversion to maths, conversion to scaleable & editable shapes on the Kobo (a bit like Visio) that can have converted handwriting and freehand drawing. The Basic Notebook is a bit like the reMarkable Notebook, no local conversion, but more limited drawing tools than the reMarkable (which is more like a fancy paint program than notebook). The basic notebook has backgrounds and can export images only, as PDF, PNG or JPEG, either current page or entire notebook.
The 4.36.x also adds subfolder creation via the New dialogue.
There are tool bars. You can't type text directly (recently added to reMarkable), even with a BT Keyboard, unless it's changed in 4.36 (or 4.37 beta). A BT keyboard will let you enter names of notebooks/folders and page up/down.

The other "product" in the Kobo Sage / Elipsa / Elipsa 2 is the My Books & Search, though it's possible to have imported images and view, it's basically epub/kepub or PDF. This is exactly the same as other Kobos except Pen "annotation" is added.
PDFs and ebooks are treated differently on all Kobos. There is no assurance that a PDF has a text layer (most of mine don't), so traditionally you highlighted with finger and annotated with real text. Touch keyboard, though all models with BT work with a BT keyboard.
The Pen models add two kinds of pen annotation:
1) On PDFs, is somewhat like annotation of any PDF on any platform with a digitiser stylus support and is like the reMarkable annotation of PDFs, it seems to add an image layer.

2) On ebooks you can use pen instead of finger to highlight (useful if you use a small display size of font zoom). Then you can annotate with real text* (touch keyboard or BT keyboard).
OR you can "handwrite" or draw directly on the ebook, but this creates annotations that can only be viewed, or screen captured (you can make the power button screen capture).
[*There are multiple ways to export real text annotations, which include the highlighted portion, date, chapter, position. This export includes bookmarks and highlight only selections.

I did have a reMarkable and a gen 2 Oasis. Still have a Kindle DXG, KK3, PW3 and buy Amazon ebooks. I was annotating proofs on the Kindle before switching to the Kobo.

I need to copy back text of ebook annotations, so the Pen is useless for ebooks directly, but if you create a matching/relevant name Advanced Notebook and simply annotate 1, 2, 3 etc for highlights, then swipe down in ebook shows last 3 previous things opened (or unfortunately added to the ereader), so you can hop to the Advanced notebook to handwrite loads and optionally convert to text (which can be edited on Kobo) and then export that as a docx or plain text.

I only ever either put little notes on PDF manuals (no need to export) or mark up format (never content as that's proofed on epub) of a PDF for POD and can copy back, or view while correcting.

No internet services needed.

As an aside I have a Libra and Libra 2. Oddly the Libra 2 supports the Pen in the sketch book (hidden on Sage/Elipsa unless you devmodeon) and the sketches, like on all Kobos, appear in "My Books". Can't edit once you save/leave.

I was very close to buying a Kindle Scribe. I'm totally familiar with the regular Amazon Kindle system and the more I read about the note / annotation features (does zero for me for azw3 ebook proof reading) the more I realised it would not suit. I can see how the unique and totally proprietary Amazon system will suit some.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Wish I could play with one for a few minutes but will probably have to settle for finding some more video reviews that go over this stuff.

Feel free to pop in if in Ireland, or transiting via Shannon. I'm about 25 minutes from Shannon Airport.

I have a life, so gave up making videos for YouTube years ago.

[HLS]

I just want more templates like BOOX has if not more. otherwise i don't care