How to find attachments with annotations and review annotations?

A place for users to ask each other questions, make suggestions, and discuss Bookends.
Post Reply
DrJJWMac
Posts: 345
Joined: Sat Jun 22, 2019 8:04 am
Location: Alabama USA

How to find attachments with annotations and review annotations?

Post by DrJJWMac »

How does one assemble a collection of PDF attachments that have annotations? How does one review the annotations (e.g. as per the review that can be done in Bookends on iPadOS)?
--
JJW
Jon
Site Admin
Posts: 10048
Joined: Tue Jul 13, 2004 6:27 pm
Location: Bethesda, MD
Contact:

Re: How to find attachments with annotations and review annotations?

Post by Jon »

1. I'm not sure what you mean by assemble, but if you mean some sort of automatic mechanism to find PDFs that have annotations and display them, there is none.

Addendum: I doubt this is what you want, but it may be of some help. You can tag PDFs and search in Bookends for those tags. So, for example, you could have a tag for PDFs with your own annotations, for PDFs in a given subject area or by a specific author, etc.

2. As I explained in another thread, you can view annotations in the note stream (which has to be open, of course) as well as the contents of highlighted text by using the Action menu and selecting Show Highlighted PDF Text as Notecards.

Jon
Sonny Software
DrJJWMac
Posts: 345
Joined: Sat Jun 22, 2019 8:04 am
Location: Alabama USA

Re: How to find attachments with annotations and review annotations?

Post by DrJJWMac »

I use labels (tags???) for other reasons. I am setting the ratings (to one star) to denote that I have annotated the file. The approach to display annotations as notes does not work with annotations that are boxes around figures. And it does not give a way to group or collect (assemble or filter) the list displays to show PDFs that have annotations versus those that do not.

This leaves me with two feature requests

* Provide a method to be able to search on annotations, even if only for their existence (e.g. "annotations are NULL" or "annotations are NOT NULL").
* Provide a way to access annotation tools in Bookends as we can do with annotation tools in Bookends iPadOS.

With regard to the second request, I am happy enough with the annotation tools in Bookends iPadOS to the point that I am giving up on my search for an external iPadOS annotation app to work with Bookends iPadOS (my tests were revolving around Highlights, which does work very nicely with Bookends iPadOS but has its own issues).
--
JJW
Jon
Site Admin
Posts: 10048
Joined: Tue Jul 13, 2004 6:27 pm
Location: Bethesda, MD
Contact:

Re: How to find attachments with annotations and review annotations?

Post by Jon »

I'm not sure what labels you're referring to, maybe color labels? I'm speaking of PDF tags, which can be quite powerful and have the advantage that the values you set belong to the PDF itself and can be used by the Finder and other apps that understand PDF tags.

If you're assigning a one star rating to references with annotations, why can't you search for references (Command-F) for one star ratings to collect references with those PDFs?

I don't know what you mean by annotations that are boxes around figures. Figures are not notes (there is no textual content). If you have an example that does contain textual data (editable, textual data, not an image containing text), please send it to me.

Finally, please specify which useful PDF annotation features in Bookends iOS don't exist in Bookends Mac.

Jon
Sonny Software
DrJJWMac
Posts: 345
Joined: Sat Jun 22, 2019 8:04 am
Location: Alabama USA

Re: How to find attachments with annotations and review annotations?

Post by DrJJWMac »

> I'm speaking of PDF tags, which can be quite powerful

Oh. Missed this. Yes, this approach will likely be better.

> Figures are not notes (there is no textual content).

Yes. So if I try to review for annotations by looking at notes but my annotated PDF has only figure annotations, I will never see the PDFs that are annotated compared to those that are annotated. Figures never appear in the notecards.

Hence the request to be able to search across PDFs for the presence of any type of annotation (figures, strikethroughs, underlines, and so on).

> Finally, please specify which useful PDF annotation features in Bookends iOS don't exist in Bookends Mac.

I cannot find how to make the annotation toolbar that so conveniently sits on the left or right side in Bookends iPadOS become visible when viewing a PDF in macOS. I don't see anywhere a toggle, and the manual has no instructions on how to do this.
--
JJW
Jon
Site Admin
Posts: 10048
Joined: Tue Jul 13, 2004 6:27 pm
Location: Bethesda, MD
Contact:

Re: How to find attachments with annotations and review annotations?

Post by Jon »

1. Notecards are text-only, and show annotations of the types that Bookends can create. So in addition to highlights and notes, it will show underlined text. Although it's possible that we'll add more in the future, the focus for the note stream is on annotations that make sense in that context. Bookends will display all sorts of annotations, including figures of course, but the note stream is for, well, notes. Figures, strikethroughs, squares, etc. don't easily fit that description.

As for the search for PDFs with annotations aspect -- I frankly doubt the general usefulness of this (I'm not saying it might not be useful to you, I'm speaking generally). More importantly, it's more problematic than I think you realize. First, Spotlight doesn't index annotations. This means that Bookends would have to find and open each PDF individually and check to see if it has annotations. Second, almost ALL PDFs have annotations of some sort. A PDF hypertext link is an annotation, a popup menu is an annotation, etc., and these have no informational value. Which means Bookends would have to not only open each PDF and check for annotations, but would then have to look at the type of each annotation until it found (or didn't find) a user-initiated one (e.g. note, free text, underline, etc.). Imagine bow long this would take if you have thousands of PDFs (as many of our users do). And in the end most users who would consider using this are the kind who routinely make annotations, so they'd end up with a list of hundreds or thousands of references with PDFs that have some kind of user-created annotation.

2. The annotation tools are at the top of the PDF, including highlighting controls and the action popup, whose contents almost all have keyboard shortcuts. So it seems you're not asking for Bookends to provide more PDF controls, but rather you want a different UI, with a palette instead of the existing arrangement.

Jon
Sonny Software
DrJJWMac
Posts: 345
Joined: Sat Jun 22, 2019 8:04 am
Location: Alabama USA

Re: How to find attachments with annotations and review annotations?

Post by DrJJWMac »

1. No problem. It is only to reference the earlier suggestion to look in notecards to find whether a PDF has annotations. This approach does not work when the annotations are not translated to note cards. I'd prefer rather than expending effort to support further types of annotations that we first have a search query to be able to find PDFs that are annotated in any way.

2. Yes. In summary ... The annotation palette in Bookends iPadOS is exceptional. The gear popup menu approach in Bookends macOS is ... confusing ... especially by comparison. Please bring the iPadOS palette to Bookends macOS.
--
JJW
Post Reply