I tried out the Scribe this week. I was surprised at how bad it is to annotate a PDF and then export it out, basically, you can’t.
My current workflow is to read and annotate books and documents in PDF form, then use DEVONthink’s Summarize Annotations tool to create a document with my highlights and notes that link back to the relevant page in the PDF. I typically use the PDF Viewer app on my Mac and iPad to do this as it can save any changes to the PDF in place.
When you try and annotate a PDF in the Scribe by adding a highlight or note you can’t even use the pen, just your finger, the pen is only useful for drawing on the PDF.
Exported PDFs don’t include your annotations in place, they are added at the end of the document, without any links to the source.
The Scribe will be going back, which is a shame as I like the hardware, but the software is so lacking.
Does anyone have suggestions for an e-ink device that can annotate and export correctly?
Ahh, we could’ve warned you PDF handling is a minefield. My workflow is the same as yours, so as a rule I will not use PDFs in any app/device that handles PDFs in a non-standard manner.
Scribe and I believe Remarkable both use non-standard formats so are no good for moving PDF annotations across different devices and systems.
The Boox line is basically just an Android operating system so is fine, and you can just pick a PDF app that uses standard annotation.
The others can advise on other e-ink devices as I didn’t research them as closely. I think the Boox Air 2 Plus is as close as I can get to “iPad as e-ink device” but the fact it was Android stopped me from purchasing. I’ve seen some good workflows with it though and people have stripped it down to just the handful of apps they want, and it looks good.
I annotate pdfs on the Scribe without any problems. Simply mark them up with the pencil. Then use the share option to quick send the document to the email account you have set up. You then have the annotated pdf on whatever device you want and you can save them into Devonthink. The annotations are where you wrote them, not at the end of the document.
I haven’t annotated a document for a few days, so I just went through this process to make sure that it still can be done. No problems. I have a pdf file that I just annotated sitting in the Inbox of Devonthink. The annotations are where I put them.
Certainly, the method for sharing the documents from the Scribe could be better, but it works for me.
The issue of whether the Scribe’s handling of PDFs is compatible with other apps has come up before on this forum. There are cases when it isn’t compatible. But I’m finding that I can go back forth from the Scribe to Devonthink to Goodnotes.
Here is a screen shot of the test I just made. The article was annotated with Scribe, exported to the Mac, opened with Goodnotes on the Mac, edited on the iPad with Goodnotes and transferred to Devonthink on the Mac, where the screenshot was made.
Sadly, no. The files are flattened. I’ve been happy with just writing directly on the pdf files and seeing my annotations when I go back through an article. I can see now I should be using the summarize feature, in which case the Scribe will be lacking.
When I refer to annotation I also mean highlighting text, adding notes (embedded) as well as draw. The Scribe can do all but you can’t (from what I can see) make use of them in DEVONthink, Preview, etc as they are flattened.
In this example, I made a note (1), highlighted some text (2), used the pen to highlight (3), and wrote a note (4). The Kindle added my embedded note at the end of the document but does not link to the source, this would be a problem in a 300-page book. In this example highlight (2) was not recorded, I am sure if have seen this done before so may be a bug.
As it is flattened you can’t take advantage of DEVONthinks Summarize Annotations tool which is s deal breaker for me.
The other annoying export problem is the email you can send only provides a link to the PDF which means you can’t use Applescript etc to process the email.
Unfortunately for my workflow, the Scribe is not of use. I was really hoping it would be as it is smaller and easier to carry to/from work. I will just keep having to use my iPad Pro 12.9 with PDF Viewer but still hope to add an e-ink device to my workflow someday.
This is partly what we’re referring to when we describe a PDF file as being compatible. As you note, Scribe is not handling annotations in a compatible manner (incidentally neither is GoodNotes, so just be aware of that).
There are two issues: how are the annotations being written to the file, and are the markups being flattened into the final export. I’m only going to talk about the first issue.
There is no official PDF standard (i.e. different software is doing different things) but we are drifting towards a standard, and Annotations already have an accepted format which many apps adhere to in order to ensure inter-operability (Adobe of course, DevonThink, PDF Expert, PDF Viewer, GoodReader, Highlights, etc., etc.).
Other software, notably GoodNotes, isn’t using standard annotation formats, which means there isn’t inter-operability. When you annotate a PDF with their software, you’re basically drawing on it (adding a vector layer) instead of using the standard annotation functions available in the PDF file format. Their own software can (and should!) understand what is drawn in the file, but to other apps it’s not readable. If you need to extract information from that file, using something other than your eyes, you will need to go back to the app you used to make the markings.
In contrast, apps thats use the standard annotation functions in PDF are marking up a standardised text layer. It’s readable by any app that is following the standard annotation convention, and you therefore don’t need to go back to the app that created the annotations in order to interact with them.
Whether you actually care about any of this depends on how you are using PDFs and your own workflows. I have PDFs I read in GoodNotes, because I actually do want to scribble over them and I don’t need compatible annotations. But for basic reading and analysing of texts, my preference is standard annotations. I need other apps to be able to extract info from those annotations, and I need to be able to edit them regardless of the availability of future software.
Thanks for posting. I gather that I will need to annotate on the iPad if I want to make the best use of my annotations of pdf files. I have paid subscriptions to GoodNotes and Notability. I was planning to drop the Notability subscription. I’m not sure now whether to stick with Notability or use one of the other apps you listed.
PDF handling is a minefield. My workflow is the same as yours, so as a rule I will not use PDFs in any app/device that handles PDFs in a non-standard manner.
, check out their digest function.