Using PDF file annotations

Hi,
Firstly I would like to say thank you for developing such an excellent research tool.

Is there any way of including data from PDF annotations in exports?
Alternatively is there any way of importing PDF annotations into the Comments field?

Thanks,
John

  1. Export to where?

  2. I think, with Biblatex, annotations are stored in the annotation or annotations field. I am not sure, if this is done automatically after having attached a pdf file to an entry, but as long as they are present (you should see it, if you check your library file in {} biblatex source tab), you could try to append them to the comments field.
    You can find this under edit > Manage field names & content
    image

@ThiloteE @johnk1 The PDF annotations are not stored anywhere in the bibtex file. They are just cached in memory.
If you comment/mark/highlight something in an attached PDF file, they can be viewed in the entry editor.

But I agree this would be a useful feature to either store them in the bib file or to have an option to export them.
I think there have been similiar feature requests.

1 Like

oh no :confused:
Sorry, I should have done more testing for this.

Hi,
Thanks for you help. That makes sense. I will have a search for the existing feature request and see what the status is.
Kind regards,
John

Hi,
I have searched in the following locations and was unable to find an existing feature request:

I’ll try to find time to do some more analysis on this.
What I need to understand is what would be the best approach to add this feature.
Would it be better to expand the bibtex data format to allow PDF Annotations to be stored directly or would it make more sense to have some kind of an import function to copy PDF Annotations into Comments?
With the second option I can see updates becoming problematic unless it overwrites all comments which may not be desirable.
Thanks again,
John

I wonder, would enabling this feature by default add to existing performance issues for large libraries? If that were the case and if this feature were to be implemented, maybe it would make sense adding it just as a preference that disables and enables storing annotations in the library file (in a bib(la)tex formated way)?

you may need a pdf annotation software, such as Adobe Acrobat, Xodo, or Foxit. pctechtest