Annotating pdfs/extracting highlights as quotes

[Jon]

Well, it won't work just like that. It will be a lot better. Why not write to me this weekend and perhaps I can give you a preview.

Jon
Sonny Software

[nicka]

Thanks. Sounds like I'm confused...

I'll be in touch at the weekend.

[Jon]

Well, I haven't gone into a lot of detail here as I'm still working through what I want and what is possible. I think you're going to like it.

Jon
Sonny Software

[reltm]

Hi Jon,

Any updates on how Bookends interacts with annotated PDFs? Perfectly understandable if you don't want to say too much about upcoming products, but I just opened a new thread discussing the shortcomings of using external PDF apps with Bookends. If you are planning to release a PDF viewer/annotator that doesn't increase the original pdf file size, then I will happily put my search on hold until your product gets released.

Thanks!

[Jon]

Please send me a pdf. I'll insert a few different kinds of annotation (using a forthcoming version of Bookends) and send it back to you. You can decide if the file size has increased more than you want or not.

Jon
Sonny Software

[reltm]

Super, Jon! Thank you for taking the time.

[Jon]

For those following, adding various types of annotation to the pdf in Bookends did increase the pdf size to the same degree as Preview (and, I gather, Skim when it exported in a PDFKit-compatible format). What this tells us is that this is a function of PDFKit. So if you want annotations to be compatible with other PDFKit-using apps (e.g. Preview), annotations will increase file size. The amount will vary a great deal between pdfs. For example, I created a pdf from a TextEdit document that was 8 KB. I added annotations, and it went to 25 KB (i.e. a trivial increase).

Jon
Sonny Software

[reltm]

I think Jon is correct that PDFKit is responsible for the size changes. Just be clear, there are (at least) two relevant processes here:

1) Adding annotations
2) How PDFKit saves files

I suspect that the annotations add only a trivial amount of data in comparison to the size of the original file. From what I've read elsewhere, PDFs are very complex files. Regardless of whether one adds annotations, PDFKit makes a lot of changes to a PDF when saving for the first time, which often changes the file size (increases or decreases) depending on the structure and content of the PDF.

Why the increase in file size even without any annotations? According to this 2012 thread, one likely explanation is how PDFKit handles licensed font types. It sounds like it turns the fonts into vector art when saving, which preserves their quality and the way they are displayed on other systems but results in (sometimes) much larger file sizes.