Feature requests re: PDF annotation interface

[taja]

I am a longtime user of Bookends but have tended to use separate PDF software (Skim then PDF Expert) for annotating. Lately, however I've been persuaded by the many advantages of marking up PDFs in Bookends. I have a few thoughts and requests for changes to the PDF interface, and wonder what other users and Jon think of them. Jon, I appreciate your presumption against adding further UI elements unless there is a very strong case. I would just say that when I open the PDF viewer and start reading/marking up, the friction of having to scan the long gear icon menu for a particular function in the absence of other UI elements and (mostly) keyboard shortcuts, makes the experience less intuitive than perhaps it could be. But maybe others will take a different view. Here are a few requests:

• Toolbar button on PDF interface to enter full-screen PDF annotation mode. It seems more intuitive to me to click a toolbar button to enter full screen annotation mode rather than mousing up to click a generic green window zoom button. This is partly because the full-screen mode entered when the PDF view is open is not simply the existing interface arrangement full-screened (as with most other MacOS apps) - it hides the reference list. The green zoom button is also a small click target, more suitable for occasional rather than repeated use - and one often ends up clicking it regularly to return to the reference list.

• Possible thumbnail/table of contents sidebar, with toolbar icon to toggle? Other PDF readers tend to have a sidebar performing this dual duty. It would have the advantage of allowing (a) quicker access to the thumbnail view than the current gear icon menu item (b) permanent access to the PDF content list rather than via a pop-over. The current pop-over also emerges from the side of the PDF rather than from the toolbar icon, which while having the merit of not obscuring the PDF view, seems a bit counter-intuitive.

• Does the PDF software allow adding bookmarks to a PDF? Perhaps these could be displayed in the suggested sidebar above, or if that's not possible, a pop-up similar to the content list.

• Is the 'Remove Selected Annotation?' dialogue box that pops up when removing an annotation (when removed using the delete key) necessary? It slows down workflow. I can see that without the ability to undo/redo annotations it creates an allowance for user error in accidentally deleting annotation, but as it's not possible to select more than one annotation for deletion at a time, such an error would be minor and easily rectified by the user. The need for confirmation is also inconsistent with right click>remove annotation not requiring it.

• On a related note, would it be possible to add undo/redo for annotations or other marking up functions, or is this an insuperable limitation to do with the PDF engine embedded in Bookends?

• Perhaps this is also a limitation of the PDF engine but would it be possible to have a back/forward button. Use case is if I switch to e.g. endnotes or an index and want to get back to the page I was looking at quickly - without having to remember the page number for each

• Again, a question about the PDF engine - is any kind of split view a possibility? This would be great for viewing endnotes/indices at the same time as content - currently I use a separate PDF reader to display these at the same time

Would be interested to know what people think of these. Thanks for bearing with a long post...

[Jon]

Thanks for your thoughts. Realize that although the PDF functions in Bookends have evolved to encompass many features found in dedicated readers, their main purpose is to enhance reference management and reference citing. Hence features like integration with the note stream, PDF tabs, deep hypertext links, etc. I've taken note of your requests, and I'll address a few comments here.

1. You don't have to use the green window button to go full screen, you can use a menu or, even better, a keyboard shortcut for this. The key combination varies depending on your version of macOS, but you can see it in the View menu (Enter Full Screen). When enter full screen the reference list and groups pane is hidden on purpose. But the PDF tab bar remains, and you can switch between references quickly using this. If you prefer everything to be shown, click on the green button with the Option key held down and the window will enlarge as much as possible, but every pane visible. Also, if you are in widescreen mode, all panes remain visible.

2. The thumbnail pane width isn't variable, which makes it a poor choice for showing text. The PDF control UI is already quite complicated, adding that wouldn't be an easy task. But point noted.

3. I can easily remove annotations via the Delete key without a warning. Would anyone miss that?

4. There is a back/forward capability if you click on links (menu and keyboard shortcut). If you're just scrolling then there is really nothing to go back to.

5. The Action gear already has quite few keyboard shortcuts. Which menu items would you like shortcuts added to (and what would they be -- it's getting hard to find unique ones).

Jon
Sonny Software

[DrJJWMac]

A few thoughts ...

* Do you have a keyboard shortcut set to switch into and out of full screen mode? Would this not address the problem in a more effective manner? Also, I suspect that you mean that the reference list becomes hidden when in compact mode, not when in widescreen mode. If so, the option to use a third party app such as Keyboard Maestro may resolve this. Set up a sequence that assures you are in widescreen mode before you go to full screen mode to annotate.

* I agree that clicking a gear icon and scrolling through a menu list is less efficient than having a floating palette of buttons to initiate actions that do/undo things with one-click.

* I agree that some of the "Do you really want to (do this)" confirmation dialogs are annoying and might be dropped or allowed to be set through super-user preference settings.

By reference, I do my markup, annotating, editing, and reviewing of PDFs almost exclusively on my iPad. I find the approach using an ApplePencil more efficient regardless of the application (e.g. PDFExpert iPad versus PDFExpert macOS) with one exception. Entering text in PDFNote fields is more efficient when done using a real keyboard input than when using an imitation iPadOS keyboard or print-text-to-typewritten-text translation using the ApplePencil. While I don't have the problems that you face because I don't work in Bookends on macOS in the way you do, I can see how they would also frustrate me if I did use your approach.

[DrJJWMac]

5. The Action gear already has quite few keyboard shortcuts. Which menu items would you like shortcuts added to (and what would they be -- it's getting hard to find unique ones).

Can you move this set of options somehow also to the main menus (e.g. under View) and thereby allow the user to set their own shortcut: Automatically Resize, Show Thumbnails, Table of Contents.

[Jon]

I've made these changes for the next update:

1. A new Settings menu in the PDF Action popup has an option to "Focus on PDF in Full Screen" (the previous and now default behavior). If unchecked you'll have access to groups and references in full screen.

2. Hold down Command when pressing Delete to bypass the annotation-is-being-deleted warning. This is a middle ground, I could remove the requirement for the modifier key if people don't want it.

3. I'm waiting to hear which options in the Action menu would benefit from a keyboard shortcut.

Jon
Sonny Software

[taja]

bookends

Those changes sound good. I am in favour of removing the requirement for the modifier key to delete an annotation. On on the other points, below, I realise I’ve been a bit wasteful of your time.

After looking more carefully at the action menu I take my comment back about the relative absence of keyboard shortcuts for action menu functions, sorry! What is there is perfectly adequate.
Re: access options for full screen mode, that seems clearer to me having been explained. I will use a KB shortcut. I suppose irrespective of my own usage habits, I thought a fullscreen toolbar icon (on the PDF toolbar, i.e. where the gear icon, highlighter, page range etc. are) would provide useful UI access on a currently sparse bit of the UI. Someone intending to work with a PDF in Bookends would likely be hovering around that area of the window already.
I had not noticed the back and forward buttons in the PDF action menu, so thanks. For some reason the KB shortcuts for back/forwardd are not working for me (Sequoia 15.3, Bookends 15.1.1). I’ll troubleshoot to see if something else is capturing my keystroke, but I wonder if it’s an issue broader than my setup? I notice Sequoia messed up some KB shortcuts for Scrivener.

Another comment: about the pop-up annotation interface that appears when text is selected. Would it be possible to have it appear without the ‘Selected Text..’ titlebar and assorted window controls? Those seem to add unnecessary clutter. I’m also not clear what the single or vertical lines between the functions denote (could they be all single, unless their meaning is significant?)

[Jon]

1. Going full screen is not just about the PDF, it's the entire window. Even in the "focus" view, you have access to the right pane (edit, note stream, summary). Adding another UI element that does the same thing as the window's green enlarge button is redundant and not native to macOS.

2. The back and forth buttons work when you click on links. For example, clicking on a cited reference in the body might take you to the reference in the bibliography. In this case, Shift-Command-[ would take you back to the citation in the text.

3. Sure the tiny title bar can be removed. But that would remove the red close window button that I'm sure some users find comforting (realizing that clicking outside the popover closes it, too). I hadn't thought of it as clutter. What do others think?

4. The double lines between some options in the selected text popover divide the options into 3 logical groups:

Highlight | Underline | PDF Note -> Annotating the PDF

Copy | Copy Link -> Copying something to the clipboard

Notecard | Quote -> Adding notecards in the note stream


Jon
Sonny Software

[DrJJWMac]

2. Hold down Command when pressing Delete to bypass the annotation-is-being-deleted warning. This is a middle ground, I could remove the requirement for the modifier key if people don't want it.

Is the delete action Undo-able (by command-Z)? If not, perhaps err on the side of caution to keep the modifier key.

4. The double lines between some options in the selected text popover divide the options into 3 logical groups:

As one who suggested the grouping, I like the arrangements yet can also concede a case that the double lines could be eliminated. I might suggest only to move the Copy and Copy Link to the end of the groupings, as the others all add to or change the character of the PDF itself. Otherwise, I wonder if some of the words (highlight ... quote) might be replaced by icons (see below).

3. Sure the tiny title bar can be removed. But that would remove the red close window button that I'm sure some users find comforting (realizing that clicking outside the popover closes it, too). I hadn't thought of it as clutter. What do others think?

At the risk of appearing to request a major UI overall, I'll chime in on this. Please appreciate that I rarely annotate in the macOS version, and my suggestions should therefore take lowest preference against those from folks who do annotations in the macOS version.

I find the on/off behavior of the popover distracting. I would rather have the popover become active as a floating panel or as a bar that can be repositioned at the top, bottom, left, or right of the PDF window.

menubar.png (26.3 KiB) Viewed 12332 times

[Jon]

Delete is not undo-able, hence the warning.

The popover is only relevant when there is selected text, which is going to be only a small fraction of the time one spends with it. And I, at least, wouldn't want to have taking up space if it wasn't needed (especially on a smaller laptop screen). Frankly, there is no end in how to configure then UI, and no solution will please everyone. Tinkering with it takes far more time than you might imagine, and once done someone will say they liked it the old way. Or they want dotted lines. Or...

Jon
Sonny Software

[DrJJWMac]

We may approach reading and annotating differently. I set out with the intent either to read a PDF without annotating it or to markup the PDF while I am reading it. I would look for the toolbar to remain hidden in the former case and the toolbar to be always visible in the latter case.

As I noted, I annotate almost exclusively on the iPadOS in Bookends, if for no other reason than that I find that its approach offers less friction than annotating with Bookends on macOS. For a respectable comparison, I can work nicely to read or to annotate in PDFExpert on either iPadOS or macOS, if for no other reason than that in PDFExpert, the UI approach to manage and display annotation tools is consistent for both platforms.

Otherwise, how you decide to carry the UI forward for this case will not deter my continued use of Bookends as a foundational tool in my needs to manage my bibliographies.

[taja]

Hi Jon,

Thanks with your patience in replying, and for making changes. Your points about tinkering with UI are well taken.

1. I concede on full screen issue. I was thinking about the PDF view - not the entire window – and specifically the kind of command you have put in the gear menu. For the former there is precedent in some other peer MacOS apps (Scrivener, DevonThink). But you are obviously right that replicating the green window button action as I suggested is bad form, especially when what is being accessed is not just a content/PDF view but the native FS mode.

2. Back and forward functions in the PDF. They also work in other ways, no? e.g. they do when I press home or end on a keyboard (external) to go to the beginning or end of the PDF (helpful for going to endnotes). But in any case the functions are there and accessible by KB shortcut, so thank you for reminding us of those.

3. Removing title bar from annotation overlay. I would have thought clicking outside a popover/overlay is fairly common in MacOS apps that have such a UI, so I had not considered some would find the close window comforting. My sense is that it is easily discoverable and downsizing an overlay where possible makes it worth the trade-off. but I'll wait for others to chime in!

Thanks again.

[Jon]

2. To be clear, some PDF actions generate a "page history", in which case the Go Forward/Go Back gear menu options (and keyboard shortcuts) work. This includes using the Home and End keys. It doesn't include the Page Up/Down keys, but does work with the keyboard shortcuts Option-Up-arrow/Option-Down-arrow. The behavior is similar to that in Preview.

3. I've removed the title bar from the annotation popover. The window can be repositioned by clicking and dragging anywhere in the background, and can be closed by selecting an action, clicking outside of its contents, or pressing Escape. If people (especially newbies) find this confusing, however, I'll rethink this.

I've also come up with what I think is a reasonable compromise when removing a highlight or underline annotation with the Delete key. If it has an associated note (i.e content added by the user) the confirm dialog will appear. But if there is no note, the highlight/underline will removed directly.

Jon
Sonny Software

[taja]

Thanks for clearing that up about the back/forward buttons. I had no idea. Looking forward to seeing the other changes, which (believe it or not) will make a daily difference to my use of Bookends. Hopefully true of at least some other people also.

[DrJJWMac]

> The popover is only relevant when there is selected text, which is going to be only a small fraction of the time one spends with it.

I've just begun using Bookends side-by-side with Curio to track the findings in journal articles. I copy text from the PDF and paste on the idea space. I admit that having the popover show up only as needed is certainly highly convenient for this use case.

[taja]

Thanks Jon, for the changes to PDF options and annotations in the latest version. To my mind they do make annotating in Bookends nicer and more friction-free. Enormously grateful, as always, to your willingness to discuss and implement changes.