They differ a lot. Skim is a classic & fully-featured PDF reading & annotation app (and offers many more PDF-related annotation features than my app ever will offer). However, Skim keeps the highlight annotations per PDF, whereas my app extracts them as plaintext notes and collects them in a document. So you can search/filter/gather your highlight notes independent from the PDF. But selecting the note will again open its source PDF and jump to the original annotation in the PDF.
While my app stores the notes in a Core Data document, it will also automatically expose all of its notes as plaintext notes on disk. This allows for basic integration with other apps. The scripting support will allow for more fine-grained integration. E.g., I’m planning to work on export (or even sync) scripts to easily exchange/sync notes with DEVONthink, Tinderbox, OmniOutliner, Bookends, etc.
I’d love to see more when you’re ready to share! I’m deeply embedded in MarginNote but open to trying something new. You noted that you’re focused on “plain-text” for PDF annotation. Are you talking only about the annotations or the PDFs? A vast majority of the PDFs I need to organize and annotate have extensive figures that I may also want to annotate, so I often draw with Apple Pencil as part of my process.
By “plaintext-focused” I’m referring to the notes that my app creates from text highlighted in a PDF. In its current state, my app only supports extraction of text from highlight annotations, and it can’t yet extract images from the PDF. Support for images is, of course, very important, and I will try to facilitate image extraction for my app. But for now, my focus is on text. And, for the foreseeable future, my app probably won’t offer any recognition capabilities of handwritten annotations, or an OCR feature.
The app will incorporate powerful tagging capabilities, workspace search, a minimalist new UI and file portability between our iPadOS, Windows and MacOS versions. It will also be our most flexible LiquidText yet, including numerous options for customizing the layout and workspace.
I think the tagging and category features are quite useful. And much easier to search.
BTW,
LiquidText is on WINDOWS!! After 18 months of work, we’re officially releasing it today!
Besides Windows, LiquidText is releasing a Mac version set for 3rd week of June, and we’re announcing a backup + sync service coming early Fall!
The sync service announcement is worrying me.
Judging by their “case studies” listed on their website they are now targeting architects, engineers and lawyers more so than casual users, students or scholars. They also advertised a real-time collaboration feature that will come with the sync service.
As someone being part of the latter user group I do not need real-life collaboration and not instant iCloud sync would totally suffice. Actually I would prefer it over a third party service. I trust the iCloud security more than the cloud security that a sync service of small team of devs can set up.
Also their sync-service sounds pricey, if they target architects/engineers/lawyers.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s their good right to charge for software, but again a macOS version has been requested for years and sync within the eco-system is basically expected nowadays. Especially since Apples makes it easy for devs and provides basic functionality right out of the box.
I was really disappointed by their recent announcements and I will most likely hold-off purchasing the macOS version altogether until their sync strategy is clearly communicated.
I might offer two extremes: MarginNote, whose iCloud sync is still unreliable, and OmniFocus, whose sync service is superb.
I have a distinct sense from experience across other apps that LiquidText took a look at the “basic functionality” provided by iCloud and realized that it would either not get them what they wanted or would require that they spend as much time developing loophole solutions as it would to roll (or contract out) their own sync service.
Other than that, let’s not forget LiquidText has to offer reliable sync to its Windows client as well. I don’t recall having iCloud syncing working well with any Windows apps.
Although I have built many really useful MarginNote repertoires and still find it to be the app to be beaten on my workflow (with is mainly legal stuff and academic activities), I can definitely see myself moving to LiquidText should its sync proves to be reliable, fast and not extremely expensive.
Having spent several hours trying to get iCloud up and running on a Windows 10 machine this week, I’d say “working well” is generous. “Working at all” is more like it
That said. I found Liquidtext on Mac to be painfully laggy and fairly unprecise on text selection. So I guess I’m staying with MarginNote for much longer
I just took the plunge – and was pleasantly surprised with the reasonable “Developing countries” IAP – which I purchased with no hesitation…
I am struggling to get hold of a new 11" iPP – but will hopefully have one soon – the lockdown seems to have brought about a major up-tick in iPad purchases around these parts…
I am still angry with myself for completely forgetting to backup my 12.9" iPP’s Liquidtext files somewhere before selling it… Highly doubt they will get pulled down from the cloud! Would’ve been fun to play around with them on the Mac.
That all said, it seems as if there is quite a fair amount of feature-parity between the two?
How is everyone doing in-depth reading on technical PDFs with a lot of maths? I’ve been an avid user and advocate for LiquidText for many years. But I’m getting increasingly frustrated with the programme. I’ve tried MarginNote, Flexcil, and Highlights. But none of them seems to fit the bill for me.
My issues with LiquidText are
It’s quite buggy. The iPad version is the most stable one but still has a lot of small issues, like non-erasable inking, invisible textboxes causing document width to change, unwritable white spaces, uneditable text excerpts, and etc. It might not sound deal breaking. But it’s been very distractive when I’m trying ver hard to focus on the reading.
Long standing bugs are not being fixed. There’s also little to none development of new features.
There’s no sync nor backup solutions. I’ve been manually exporting each document every time I make changes. This is just too tedious.
They are putting all development into a custom real-time sync service (currently in beta) in the last two years. I’ve done a small user survey. Literally no one wants to sync with yet another service instead of whatever cloud storage they prefer. This is obviously a push to SaaS by massaging the software itself into a monthly sync subscription. But I wouldn’t want to put my data onto their servers even if it’s free.
I’m frustrated to the point where I’m considering to just revert back to the most basic annotation-on-the-margin approach.
I am using MarginNote. It is not perfect bud I found nothing better (I use it almost exclusively on iPad). I was thinking about trying Obsidian+Extract your PDF text-highlights into Obsidian. But I kinda left Obsidian for Craft, so I did not play with it much.
I have just found an app called ZenReader. It offers an approach with the best features in LiquidText/MarginNote and in Highlights without the mind-map burdens of the former and the highlight-marker-only limitations of the latter.
ZenReader is macOS / Windows only (at this point). My initial tests show promise to bring the Outline output from ZenReader as a markdown file directly into Obsidian. The annotations in ZenReader also get carried over to “standard” PDF apps (e.g Preview, PDFExpert).
Does ZenReader work across a corpus of several documents? I am working through a multi-year effort involving several dozen books in PDF form. I need to correlate the notes and references across all the books. I’ve found nothing better for this than MarginNote’s “Title Link” feature.
Title-links allow you to set keywords in your notes as node titles for MarginNote 3 to recognise them across different mind maps and study notebooks by automatically generating hyperlinks. You can enable title-links for the main mind map and child mind maps too. You can even select different colours for different child mind maps, although we only have four options at the moment. Those of us that like very colourful notes, you will need more colours. When you tap on these links, you can see all the notes containing that keyword and you can zone in on that term in this small window. MarginNote 3.7: What’s New? | Paperless X
Which, of course, has the consequence of locking me into MarginNote. I can only hope that MarginNote still exists in 6 years when this project is complete.
I do not know. I have some hope that the question may be answered by connecting the markdown-formatted outlines of annotations collected from each PDF using Obsidian.
Put another way … ZenReader does not offer the mapping and study options that are found in LiquidText and MarginNote. Take the front third of MarginNote (making annotations with tags and notes), capture the ability of Highlights to grab text and figures, add an ability to create a LINEAR outline of the annotations, figures, and text in any order, add an ability to include running comments in the outline, and finally add export of the outline to markdown. These are (roughly stated) the main features of ZenReader.
I have found support at ZenReader to be receptive to proposals.
Sorry I’m not a MarginNote or Hook user but perhaps someone else might know, could you use Hook to make the linkage between your PDF documents? If so that would remove the dependance of that feature from a particular PDF management application.
Yes, Hook is a possibility. I am not wild about Hook because if I used it to link two notes, for example, there is no visible way of knowing there is linkage without launching Hook and opening the Hook popover. Since Hook has never come up with a method to show that a pre-existing Hook link exists. If you create a hyperlink between items, it’s obvious that a hyperlink exists: every software that supports hyperlinks makes the linkage visible. OTOH, I’ve come to think of Hook as a cool idea that so far is marred by a bit of a pernicious lock-in.
