Sonny Software

Hi everyone,

I am very happy with using Bookends, it’s a fantastic programm and very helpful for my research.

I currently ran into a problem with the extraction of PDF-Annotations and I hope to find some help here. I searched the forum to see whether this problem was already reported, bu could not find a post indicating so. If I am wrong, I apologize for creating this post.

My problem in short is, that when I extract Notes from a given Reference, the PDF-Annotations are not all extracted. By PDF-Annotations I mean the Notecards, which are created whenever I highlight text in the Ios-App of Bookends, tap it and then slect „Note“ > „Comment“. I do it this way to have access to the annotations in other apps, too e.g. when I share the PDFs with my colleagues who don’t use Bookends.

My main use case is, that I read and annotate PDFs in Bookends on the iPad and then, on the Mac, I copy these Annotations (via right click on Notecard > „Copy Motecard“) into Tinderbox to create notes there. As I am annotating a lot, I wanted to speed this process up, by extracting all notes of a given Reference at once and copy them as text into Tinderbox, where I can then separate the big text into smaller notes quickly.

Now the problem I have is, that when I use „File“ > „Extract Notes and PDF Annotations“ Menu, some of my annotations are included in the extracted text and some aren’t. In some cases, no Annotations are included in the extracted text.


In the given Example, I ran the Extraction on this Reference:

with the following configuration:

And got this Output:

So, the first two annotations are missing. The rest of the is included. In other cases I have even got no output of annotations at all in some cases. I have no clue so far, what the reason for this behavior is.

Does anybody else experience similar problems and/or found out how to solve it?
I can provide the PDF-File, if that might help.

Thank you for yout time and help.

Best regards,

Yann Schosser

I recently had another user who had intermittent problems with extractions that I couldn't reproduce. I believe that after rebooting several times (and upgrading the OS, which is a confounding factor) it worked again as expected. Please try the rebooting part, maybe in safe mode (Shift key held down).

Jon
Sonny Software

Hello Jon,

thank you very much for your quick answer and the advice.

I have rebooted multiple times, also in the safe mode, but the problem persists. My OS is up to date, as is my version of Bookends.

I'll try again over the next days and report back, as soon as it works.

Best,

Yann

You can also send me this PDF and I'll try the extraction here.

Jon
Sonny Software

I might be having a similar issue. I have been reading and highlighting pdf's in Bookends on iOS. Sometimes I want to comment on or summarize a highlight so I tap the highlighted text>Note>Comment and enter text in a box that says "Text Highlight" at the top.
When reading on MacOS I highlight and then add note.

When I'm on Mac Bookends and hoping to extract highlights and notes, the Text Highlight comments are not extracted, whether added on iOS or MacOS, even when I have confirmed they synced.

Is this as intended? Perhaps those highlight notes are not yet included in the Extract Notes and PDF annotations? I do have all the annotation types set to extract in the configure dialog. Latest versions of OS's and Bookends.

Thanks!

This appears to be a bug, or at least a change in behavior, in Sequoia (let me know if that's your OS). In any case, there is a workaround for it in the next Bookends update (coming soon), so keep an eye out for that.

Jon
Sonny Software

Thanks Jon, yes, it's Sequoia ... appreciate the speedy replies and updates!