Problems with Merged Highlights

aguaKate · 03-29-2013, 10:37 AM

Hi all!
I've looked to see if there was another thread addressing this and I didn't see one. I apologize in advance if this has been covered and I missed it! In short, the merged highlights from PDF files look terrible - almost unreadable because of the dark, opaque color. I've opened them in four different readers, and the result is always similarly bad (the first screenshot below is from Acrobat, the second from Preview). On the positive side, they are editable and so the color can be manually changed in other pdf viewers. This is a great feature generally, but replacing all of the highlights one at a time is not really a reasonable workaround for this problem.

1) Is there any way to change the settings for the highlight color from the Boox itself?

2) If not, does anyone know how to change the color of all highlights within a PDF at once?

I love the pdf features of the Boox, but this issue makes moving PDFs almost pointless and renders my work there incompatible with the rest of my workflow. One other issue with the highlights - even though the Boox exports a a fantastic text file of exported annotations, the highlighted text as read by other PDF readers omits the spaces, again making the highlights less useful.

Any suggests on this issue would be greatly appreciated!

An aside - the thumbnail view feature from the old PDF viewer is great for moving through documents quickly to find a particular page by sight. I would love to see this feature brought to the new version. Also, thanks Booxter for the PDF most recent reader fixes! Great improvements!

Mono · 03-29-2013, 03:53 PM

I do not know the solution to your problem... And, what exactly the problem is? Is it that the highlight is word-wise? And you would prefer have it one continuous interrupted highlight?

You mentioned problem with missing spaces in annotations exported to text file. It is an old problem which Onyx tries to handle (they say it is caused by a bug in Adobe pdf library...), but no success so far. If I am not mistaken it has to do something with text coding used. If I remember well most/all pdf generated from LaTex have this problem. It seems to me that UNICODE text coding is the source of problem.

If you want to experiment, try to recode pdf from UNICODE to older coding.

Also the highlight behaviour might be caused by this.

It seems to me, that Onyx programmers could solve at least the "highlight text fragmentation" behaviour. They could look for fragmented highlight text and join it to single one. Try to ask Booxstor to add it to TODO list.

It is hard to say how much programming work it is. It may be one to few hours, it may be much, much more, depending on how the things are implemented in software.

aguaKate · 03-29-2013, 04:35 PM

Mono, thanks for the reply! I realize now how unclear my first post was... My main issue is with the color of the merged highlights. Once merged they are a dark muddy color which obscures the text. (I attached a couple examples in the first post). Do you know how if this color can be changed? Is that the normal color for merged highlights?

I don't actually have a problem with missing spaces in the text file - that works great as long as the OCRed PDF is of good quality. The spaces are only missing after merging (when viewing highlights and annotations in Preview, Acrobat, etc.)

I would guess that these missing spaces have to do with the 'highlight text fragmentation' issue. Which is something that would be nice to have fixed, but is secondary to the obscuring color issue.

Sorry for my lack of clarity! I hope this makes more sense now!

Mono · 03-29-2013, 05:57 PM

OK, if the colour is the problem, ask Booxstor to do the colour user selectable (at least one global colour, not necesserily colour for each highlight..).

Or at least let the current default colour change to something else. (Should not be more than few minutes of work...)

It would solve your problem with new highlights. The old probably have the colour assigned and stored somewhere in sgl database. Someone might write the script to alter the colour data in database...

ChristineGER · 03-29-2013, 07:47 PM

Hey,

little help with changing the color at the whole document in one step in Preview (Mac):

Open the Annotations Inspector*, mark all highlights in the list with CMD+A, than change the color.
Done :-)

* described here:
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/artic...s-x-annotating

aguaKate · 03-30-2013, 06:03 PM

Great! I'll send him a message. Glad to know that should be a doable request.

ChristineGER, thanks the suggestion! I got to the annotation inspector, which I hadn't located before. But after selecting all of the highlights I couldn't figure out how to change the color. I hit "option cmd C", but that didn't work. I also tried hitting the highlight tool, which also didn't work.

ChristineGER · 04-05-2013, 05:14 AM

Dear aguaKate,

I have made a little help-sheet:

Its the german version of preview, but I guess the symbols are the same.

Hope that works :-)

aguaKate · 04-11-2013, 10:40 AM

Hey ChristineGER,
That is a lovely 'cheat sheet'! Thanks for that! Looking at it though, I think we might have different versions of Preview, since the toolbar on the top of yours seems to have quite a few more options (und nicht nur wegen der Sprache

). This is my first mac and I'm using mountain lion. In mine when I select a highlight (one or many) in the highlight manager, it greys out the color change option. Annoying!

But building on your suggestion, I tried working through the annotation manager in Acrobat, and that did allow me to change the color of all of the hightlights at once. So, even though it didn't work in Preview, your advice helped me to a solution!

Thanks!!

ChristineGER · 04-12-2013, 03:51 AM

cool :-)

03-29-2013, 10:37 AM	#1
aguaKate Member Posts: 16 Karma: 10 Join Date: Aug 2011 Location: Phila, USA Device: Entourage Edge, Boox M92	Problems with Merged Highlights Hi all! I've looked to see if there was another thread addressing this and I didn't see one. I apologize in advance if this has been covered and I missed it! In short, the merged highlights from PDF files look terrible - almost unreadable because of the dark, opaque color. I've opened them in four different readers, and the result is always similarly bad (the first screenshot below is from Acrobat, the second from Preview). On the positive side, they are editable and so the color can be manually changed in other pdf viewers. This is a great feature generally, but replacing all of the highlights one at a time is not really a reasonable workaround for this problem. 1) Is there any way to change the settings for the highlight color from the Boox itself? 2) If not, does anyone know how to change the color of all highlights within a PDF at once? I love the pdf features of the Boox, but this issue makes moving PDFs almost pointless and renders my work there incompatible with the rest of my workflow. One other issue with the highlights - even though the Boox exports a a fantastic text file of exported annotations, the highlighted text as read by other PDF readers omits the spaces, again making the highlights less useful. Any suggests on this issue would be greatly appreciated! An aside - the thumbnail view feature from the old PDF viewer is great for moving through documents quickly to find a particular page by sight. I would love to see this feature brought to the new version. Also, thanks Booxter for the PDF most recent reader fixes! Great improvements! Attached Thumbnails Last edited by aguaKate; 03-29-2013 at 04:40 PM. Reason: edited for clarity of problem

03-29-2013, 04:35 PM	#3
aguaKate Member Posts: 16 Karma: 10 Join Date: Aug 2011 Location: Phila, USA Device: Entourage Edge, Boox M92	Highlight color Mono, thanks for the reply! I realize now how unclear my first post was... My main issue is with the color of the merged highlights. Once merged they are a dark muddy color which obscures the text. (I attached a couple examples in the first post). Do you know how if this color can be changed? Is that the normal color for merged highlights? I don't actually have a problem with missing spaces in the text file - that works great as long as the OCRed PDF is of good quality. The spaces are only missing after merging (when viewing highlights and annotations in Preview, Acrobat, etc.) I would guess that these missing spaces have to do with the 'highlight text fragmentation' issue. Which is something that would be nice to have fixed, but is secondary to the obscuring color issue. Sorry for my lack of clarity! I hope this makes more sense now!

04-05-2013, 05:14 AM	#7
ChristineGER Enthusiast Posts: 25 Karma: 36 Join Date: Feb 2013 Device: Kindle 4	Dear aguaKate, I have made a little help-sheet: Its the german version of preview, but I guess the symbols are the same. Hope that works :-) Last edited by ChristineGER; 04-05-2013 at 05:16 AM.

04-11-2013, 10:40 AM	#8
aguaKate Member Posts: 16 Karma: 10 Join Date: Aug 2011 Location: Phila, USA Device: Entourage Edge, Boox M92	Hey ChristineGER, That is a lovely 'cheat sheet'! Thanks for that! Looking at it though, I think we might have different versions of Preview, since the toolbar on the top of yours seems to have quite a few more options (und nicht nur wegen der Sprache ). This is my first mac and I'm using mountain lion. In mine when I select a highlight (one or many) in the highlight manager, it greys out the color change option. Annoying! But building on your suggestion, I tried working through the annotation manager in Acrobat, and that did allow me to change the color of all of the hightlights at once. So, even though it didn't work in Preview, your advice helped me to a solution! Thanks!! Attached Thumbnails

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03-29-2013, 03:53 PM	#2
Mono Mono Posts: 699 Karma: 13333 Join Date: Jan 2012 Device: Boox M92	I do not know the solution to your problem... And, what exactly the problem is? Is it that the highlight is word-wise? And you would prefer have it one continuous interrupted highlight? You mentioned problem with missing spaces in annotations exported to text file. It is an old problem which Onyx tries to handle (they say it is caused by a bug in Adobe pdf library...), but no success so far. If I am not mistaken it has to do something with text coding used. If I remember well most/all pdf generated from LaTex have this problem. It seems to me that UNICODE text coding is the source of problem. If you want to experiment, try to recode pdf from UNICODE to older coding. Also the highlight behaviour might be caused by this. It seems to me, that Onyx programmers could solve at least the "highlight text fragmentation" behaviour. They could look for fragmented highlight text and join it to single one. Try to ask Booxstor to add it to TODO list. It is hard to say how much programming work it is. It may be one to few hours, it may be much, much more, depending on how the things are implemented in software.

03-29-2013, 05:57 PM	#4
Mono Mono Posts: 699 Karma: 13333 Join Date: Jan 2012 Device: Boox M92	OK, if the colour is the problem, ask Booxstor to do the colour user selectable (at least one global colour, not necesserily colour for each highlight..). Or at least let the current default colour change to something else. (Should not be more than few minutes of work...) It would solve your problem with new highlights. The old probably have the colour assigned and stored somewhere in sgl database. Someone might write the script to alter the colour data in database...

03-29-2013, 07:47 PM	#5
ChristineGER Enthusiast Posts: 25 Karma: 36 Join Date: Feb 2013 Device: Kindle 4	Hey, little help with changing the color at the whole document in one step in Preview (Mac): Open the Annotations Inspector, mark all highlights in the list with CMD+A, than change the color. Done :-) described here: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/artic...s-x-annotating

03-30-2013, 06:03 PM	#6
aguaKate Member Posts: 16 Karma: 10 Join Date: Aug 2011 Location: Phila, USA Device: Entourage Edge, Boox M92	Great! I'll send him a message. Glad to know that should be a doable request. ChristineGER, thanks the suggestion! I got to the annotation inspector, which I hadn't located before. But after selecting all of the highlights I couldn't figure out how to change the color. I hit "option cmd C", but that didn't work. I also tried hitting the highlight tool, which also didn't work.

04-12-2013, 03:51 AM	#9
ChristineGER Enthusiast Posts: 25 Karma: 36 Join Date: Feb 2013 Device: Kindle 4	cool :-)