Desktop App Kobo annotation exporter

[Toxaris]

In February 2012 Yoths wrote a small tool for exporting annotations from the Sony PRS-T1 to HTML. After a few updates he disappeared from the forum and I have been unable to contact him. He did leave behind the sourcecode.

The program still does contains some bugs and I took it upon myself to try to squash those bugs. Not only that, but I also extended the program to also export annotations (and markings) from the Kobo readers that support annotations. Therefore I renamed the application from 'PRST1AnnotationExporter' to 'Annotation Exporter'.

This is the first release.

It supports:
- Highlights (text selection) for Sony PRS-Tx and Kobo
- Text annotations (text selection + typed note) for Sony PRS-Tx and Kobo
- Drawing annotations (text selection + painted note) Sony PRS-Tx only
- For ePub books, the original selected text can be expanded (e.g. to avoid the 200-characters-limit).
- Design your own export style, default and simple included

It DOES NOT support:
- Drawing annotations made by painting directly on a page (without text selection)

It still contains one bug that sometimes appears while exporting to HTML that has to do with the text expansion. I cannot fix this without a testcase. If other bugs turn up, please let me know.

[Toxaris]

New version is released. Some bugs squashed and now it is also possible to delete annotations (per book) directly on the reader for maintenance purposes.

This version can be retrieved from my site, see my signature for the link.

[Namenlos]

Hello, interesting tool, I was not aware of its existence and have use for it.

However I couldn't get it to run.

First the installation progress was in Dutch (which wasn't a problem, it is always funny seeing how much you can understand as a German understanding Plattdeutsch). I have an English Windows.

Then it has no start menu entry in Win 8.1

After starting it and connecting the ebook reader (Kobo Mini) and selecting it in the internal memory drop down menu I get a crash: https://imgur.com/kQl5dZT

When staring it after connecting the Kobo it crashes right on the start: https://imgur.com/PW7Inmw

I hope that helps you improving the tool. If I can be of any help in debugging the issues please let me know.

edit: I identified the .Net and SQLite Version and put the missing dll ( https://system.data.sqlite.org/downl...0-1.0.97.0.zip ) into the program folder. This gave me at least another error: https://imgur.com/CqSI280

[Toxaris]

It seems that the installer I created was not correct. I will create a new installer that should fix this issue. It is strange that you got the dutch installer, I was convinced that I took the English version.

*Update* New version uploaded. Please let me know if that fixes your problems. Please remove the dll you installed yourself earlier.

[Namenlos]

Now I get this error: https://imgur.com/fprG03Q when exporting. Starting the exe with elevated rights (as Admin) doesn't help. edit: Oh, the export works though! edit2: Empty Page 0 entries provoke the error: https://imgur.com/VXzVEch

Installer works and is English now. I think I might have seen some Dutch in the status, but that went by too fast.

edit3: Most likely my db is broken I think. If you want to investigate here is the export: http://pastebin.com/rK2LYp6g

[Toxaris]

Yes, if you try to extend the annotations and for one it does not work, the program will try to continue with the next instead of stopping completely. That is by design. Therefore I changed most errors to warnings, but this one I missed apparently.

Databases can go corrupt of course. I will see if I can spot anything in your export.

[Toxaris]

I had not seen this error before, but I think I know what caused it. It will be fixed. Now with regards to the empty lines. It can be the database in this case.
Sometimes another error shows that the extended annotation cannot be retrieved. In those cases the actual selection is exported, but not the text surrounding. The issue there is that the location of the selection is encoded. This encoding has been cracked, but it seems that sometimes the wrong location is stored. In those cases the export still works, but without the additional text unfortunately.

[Namenlos]

As far as I know the blank lines do not show up on my Kobo, I was quite surprised that the two other books showed up, as I could only remember one book were I made annotations. So as far as I know everything works perfect, just the cases were my database is corrupt show up as blank entries while on the Kobo they are ignored. In fact I even prefer it your way.

Anyways thank you for picking up this great tool and improving it.

[surquizu]

I really like the app. Thank you.

But I get an error when the option " ePUB Books: Expand marked text" is selected. If I accept 9-10 times the error , the program exports good the notes and the highlights.

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by surquizu

I really like the app. Thank you.

But I get an error when the option " ePUB Books: Expand marked text" is selected. If I accept 9-10 times the error , the program exports good the notes and the highlights.

I think this is an error that pops up sometimes on specific books, as I can't read the error. I don't know the reason yet. The annotation will be exported anyway, but expanding the text is possible for those annotations. If it happens, it usually happens if the annotations has multiple tags.
If you want me to dive into it and try to solve it, I need the database from the reader and the book itself. If you are willing to sent me this, please sent me a pm.

[marp68]

Thank, worked great.

Can this file be used together with the books copied to a new/factory reset device? That is, if I put the file somewhere on the new device, will I see the markups/annotations when opening the book?

If not, do you have any suggestions on how to do this?

I only need to backup the markups/annotations in case of a later device failure.

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by marp68

Thank, worked great.

Can this file be used together with the books copied to a new/factory reset device? That is, if I put the file somewhere on the new device, will I see the markups/annotations when opening the book?

If not, do you have any suggestions on how to do this?

I only need to backup the markups/annotations in case of a later device failure.

That file cannot be used for that. All the markups/annotations are stored in an database on the reader. If you want the markups/annotations on another device, you will need to copy those tables. It might be possible to copy the database, but I would be careful with that since a all the device settings/information/etc are also stored in that database.

[marp68]

okej, thanks.

[nelsonm]

I get the following error message when I plug in my device (a Kobo Aura H20):

Error getting books information: startIndex cannot be larger than length of string.
Parameter name: startIndex

What might cause the problem? Thanks.

[Toxaris]

Frankly, I wouldn't know. In the program there is no variable startIndex. Can you tell me what you tried that gave this error? Can you see the books at all when you select the Kobo reader?

I would need the .kobo directory of your reader to see what is going on. That way I would be able to simulate the activity.

Since this is the second report about this (the other about a Kobo HD) I suspect Kobo changed something.