Ideal pdf reader for studying: my recommendation, your ideas?

[Elizabeth_b]

Like I think many people here, I bought an m96 to read and annotate technical pdfs.

The neo reader would be perfect, except, the annotations are proprietory and don't export. I need to be able to annotate in the same format as Adobe, Okular etc use so I can flick through them on my computer, share with co-authors, and still access them in 15 years time when all these devices are long forgotten.

Booxtor: It's a real pity you guys went with a new annotation system instead of working with the regular interoperable one.

So I've tried a few other apps: ReplicGo, qNotes, Foxit. The best still seems to be what I found before for my NST: ezpdf.

Annotations work perfectly, if you want to underline or highlight and attach a text note to these, or use text boxes. (Swiftkey seems to be the best keyboard, though happy to try other recommendations). Freehand scribble is not nearly as good as in the neo reader, so this isn't a good solution for those who wanted that.

The complication is navigation. It's an app designed for tablets, and it wants to scroooooooooll. You can beautifully zoom in to a box around any block of text, but how to move on, without hideous shadowing, and preferably without having to drag with the stylus every time??

Well, I have a half-decent workaround. Use the settings to set the volume keys to be zoom buttons. Use them to zoom in to a reasonable crop. Then, in the principal menu set "lock horizontal scroll" (do this by opening the menu with the settings in the top left, not the side swipe menu, or it mucks up your horizontal scroll before you've set it!). NOW you can actually scroll up and down, page after page, using the little joystick! Wonderful! And even the shadowing isn't as bad.

But does anyone have a better solution? Would love to hear how others are using their readers.

[markom]

Do you have printscreen(screenshot) option ?

In KPV(Kindle DX) there is screenshot(print screen) option that saves current screen e.g. if we've underscored some sentences in pdf, we can save the underscored page and transfer it later to PC (as 1000x824 166dpi bitmap).

It would be good if you could save scribblings and highlights in Onyx Neo Reader this way, untill they fix pdf exporting.


You can also try using k2pdfopt for cropping and optimizing pdf for ezpdf app.
Maybe it'll be a bit faster or visually better for transition this way, because there is just need for next/prev page button.

Flipping and rendering would sure be considerably faster by using k2pdfopt for optimization beforehand (as bitmap mode, not as native) if original pdf used more demanding compression method like those from archive.org or new Abbyy 12 that asks for powerfull processors.

[Booxtor]

Hi,
as i mentioned in other thread you could the latest update (1.6.4). It has already working export of annotations (Neo Reader merges highlightings and scribbles in a xxx.PDF document in a new xxx.export.pdf) . Very soon export of citations and comments in a new text file will follow.
__________________

[laird18]

Booxtor, I'm looking for exactly this solution but my M96 is locked to 1.6.2. (I purchased through onyx-boox.com.)

Do you have any advice?

All the best,
Michael

[laird18]

Is there any way to update the Onyx Neo Reader without having to update the firmware?

The version on my M96 is dev 14-08-22 (928).

[Jmirko]

Originally Posted by Elizabeth_b

Like I think many people here, I bought an m96 to read and annotate technical pdfs.
...
But does anyone have a better solution? Would love to hear how others are using their readers.

Try Moonreader+. I recently tested it for a friend and it seems to have most of the functionality you need, including excellent highlighting and commenting.

[grapiuna]

Originally Posted by Jmirko

Try Moonreader+. I recently tested it for a friend and it seems to have most of the functionality you need, including excellent highlighting and commenting.

jmirko, I have Moonreader+ but it is not good on turning pages because it has an effect that I did not find how to desactivate.

Could you point what are your settings.

Thanks

[markom]

Originally Posted by Elizabeth_b

...
But does anyone have a better solution? Would love to hear how others are using their readers.

E-ink(s) for reading, and whenever necessary, simultaneously using tablet(s) for scribbling, annotations, color recognition, dictionaries, quicker page flipping, searching and cross-referencing, multitasking etc.

[barisgecer]

Originally Posted by Booxtor

Hi,
as i mentioned in other thread you could the latest update (1.6.4). It has already working export of annotations (Neo Reader merges highlightings and scribbles in a xxx.PDF document in a new xxx.export.pdf) . Very soon export of citations and comments in a new text file will follow.
__________________

Hi Booxtor, I recently started using Neo Reader as I realized that most of its bugs are solved with new firmwares. Thanks for that.

Yet, what I would like to do is to keep my pdf documents (scribles and notes) updated with my Dropbox. Dropbox Application from Android is sensitive to changes on the document that you download to the device. So I need to overwrite the document with the changes that I made with Neo Reader.

Unfortunately, Neo reader export changes to another file under another folder and rename it (i.e. .export.pdf). I would like to have an option to overwrite my changes on the original file so that Dropbox automatically upload changed file.

My biggest benefit from your device is these kind of stuff. I would appreciate it if you could update the Neo Reader accordingly. Or maybe anyone can suggest me a simple hack to move the export file to the original location and overwrite it after exporting.

Thanks

[nknouf]

That's one reason why I use ezpdf, as it incorporates the annotations into the same PDF file, allowing me to use Dropbox in the manner you describe. I can also use the movement buttons on my M96 to navigate through my PDF, although occasionally it will move forward two pages instead of one. But I strongly prefer ezpdf to any of the other options; just turn off the page turning animation and you're good to go.

[barisgecer]

Originally Posted by nknouf

That's one reason why I use ezpdf, as it incorporates the annotations into the same PDF file, allowing me to use Dropbox in the manner you describe. I can also use the movement buttons on my M96 to navigate through my PDF, although occasionally it will move forward two pages instead of one. But I strongly prefer ezpdf to any of the other options; just turn off the page turning animation and you're good to go.

Thank you for the suggestion.

Recently I started using Neo, before that I have been heavily using ezPdf. You are right for note-taking, yet it is not as smooth as Neo when it comes to reading experience. I read scientific papers which are mostly 2-column format. ezPdf have an autonomus navigation for zooming to a column etc. but not working properly, it is full of bugs which irritates me after a while. I don't mention about the screen getting washed out after while because of its moving animation (not turning) from one column to other.

All these mentioned problems of ezPdf are smoothly solved by Neo reader. I appreciate the developers for putting sooooo many options for pdf navigation. And screen is more compatible with it. Just one single thing => Overwriting.

Actually there is one more advantage of ezPdf over Neo which is Dictionary support. You can install any dict (I prefer Golden Dict) and it supports. I don't know if I can do the same for Neo Reader. I want to change the dictionary because it shows Chinese character with together English meaning.

[Elizabeth_b]

Sounds like the problem is actually with the way the Dropbox app works? Have you tried using Dropsync instead? That works in the same way as the Dropbox desktop client: you identify entire directories to always keep in sync. You'll end up with duplicate copies of the papers you've annotated, of course, but no system is perfect.

[I much prefer ezpdf because annotations are interoperable with Adobe, Okular etc, but I don't have to deal with columns so often.]

[nknouf]

Sorry to hear that ezPDF has problems with dealing with columns. I find it has redrawing issues even in single-column text, which is why I am constantly manually refreshing the page. But the inter-operation with Adobe and other PDF readers is one of the main reasons why I stick with it--if I can't use my annotations cross-platform, cross-software, then the annotations are useless to me.

I don't know if there is a setting in NeoPDF to allow for automatic overwriting of the original PDF with the annotated one. I know that ezPDF has that setting. If NeoPDF does not, then I'm afraid that it's unlikely that using a different syncing program will solve your problem.

[jzzcllo]

I'm struggling with this, too. Just got an M96, was really excited to use it for reading lots of PDFs in grad school. I wanted to use the citation manager Zotero with Zotfile to move PDFs to the M96 and back again, via Box, while preserving the highlights I made.

I can't seem to do that with NeoReader, because it does not have integration with cloud storage (DropBox, Box, etc), and it also does not have a setting to overwrite the existing PDF with the highlights you made.

I can't figure out how to access and edit Box files with ezPDF either. So my best workaround is to use ES File Explorer, and open the PDFs from there in ezPDF.

Would love the functionality to be able to overwrite pdfs, and to have integration with cloud servers. Would be a game-changer for academics who read lots of PDFs. Maybe it exists already, but I've now spent days trying to figure it out.