Adding comments directly to a PDF?

[drew-heider]

Hi, thanks for making such a great plugin! I'm an academic and it's really resolved a lot of issues. I am curious if it is possible to add comments directly to a PDF's margins, similar to how you can directly add highlights. I'm thinking something similar to the implementation in Adobe or FoxIt (pictured below) where you don't need a separate markdown document. I couldn't figure out how to do it, so wanted to see if it's even possible at all.

Thanks!

[RyotaUshio]

I'm not sure if I understand you correctly but isn't this it?

Screen.Recording.2024-03-29.at.13.50.48.mov

[RyotaUshio]

I've created a related issue: #225

[samanthavenialogan]

This issue has been resolved in the newest patch :) I've commented with resolution on the related issue linked above.

[samanthavenialogan]

Hey @RyotaUshio,

I have sadly come across another PDF issue that is having the same problem (though weirdly better) again :/

I've uploaded the PDF I'm struggling with here for your review:
Paper-Antisocial Online Behavior Detection Using Deep Learning-community_moderation-zinovyeva-2019.pdf

Once again I have highlighted and commented throughout the document but the copy/paste feature shows empty comments again.

The weird part is that it will pull the comments on highlights that are currently 'on screen' but it seems like the document is 'lazy loading' Those changes and comments a certain distance form the screen load will not pull. I can't figure out what the distance is before it stops rendering comments though. It will capture several pages +/- the window's load. If you scroll down to page 22 for instance the comment there will load but the beginning comments will not. If you go to page 9, it again, copies comments on that highlight but none of the others at the start of the document.

HILARIOUSLY, I thought it would be an amazing workaround of 'just zoom out' and that absolutely improved the issue. I was able to get all highlights by zooming to 10% and then going to page 8 (half way) and it collected them all. I have not found this issue on any other PDFs so far and I'll hunt around for more as I pursue research but I'm concerned what will happen when I pull up longer documents.

---

Critically, when using a specific highlight C/P, it does pull the comment. I have not changed my prompt for the comments changes.

> [!{{calloutType}} ] {{linkWithDisplay}}
>>**Quote**: _{{selection}}_
>
>>**Comment**:  {{comment}}`

[samanthavenialogan]

Hey @RyotaUshio just wanted to follow up on this?

I does indeed look like it might be a lazy load issue. Just attempted to pull a 50 page document and from 25 it pulled only from 13 to 33.

Here is the document:
paper-The Rise of Content Cartels-politics-Evelyn Douek-2019.pdf

[samanthavenialogan]

@RyotaUshio can I by chance get an update on this pdf viewer issue? it won't copy comments outside of the load menu on PDFs but when I zoom out to make sure as many pages as possible are there it will load more. Sadly I'm often reading entire books and Ph.D manuscripts for review that are over 100 pages and they cannot possibly fit on view windows beyond 40-60 pages.

[drew-heider]

Oops sorry, let me clarify! I mean is it possible to have an icon next to a highlight that contains an annotation to add a visual cue to where comments are?

[N3C2L]

You could add a new color and change the name of this color to "comment".
If your annotation contains a comment, right click and change the color to your "comment" color.
For example: All highlights that don't contain comments have a green highlight color.
And for highlights that contain a comment, you have a red highlight color.
That's easy to distinguish and you can even add more colors named "Questions" or "Research" etc.
You only need to learn the colors and you know what's "behind" a highlight.

[drew-heider]

Thanks for this! I've started using this system. The only issue is that I'm color blind so at times it can be a bit difficult to distinguish colors if there's more than one on a single page. It would be great if we could have another visual cue for comments as well, similar to how other pdf readers will show a little sticky note in the margins or box.

Thanks for your help with this!

[samanthavenialogan]

Isn't there a color blind obsidian theme? it's plausible you could implement that and then adapt the PDF++ to that system?

[Dennyyusuf]

Hello I don't know that this is possible. Can you please teach me on how to make a comment directly in the PDF without copy / paste the highlight into markdown file?

[samanthavenialogan]

Hey @Dennyyusuf,

I implemented my setup like this:

1. Ensure PDF++ is installed, enabled and fully updated.

2. go into the plugin settings and ensure the following settings are set to 'on'

   1. Enable PDF Editing | ON
   2. Annotation author [your name. an annotator should be mentioned for the files metadata.]
   3. Highlight backlinks in PDF viewer | ON
   4. Colors [confirm your highlights are properly named for their intended purpose so it comes through in the template]
      
   5. Under menu items set all of them to ON except optional ones like read aloud selected text.
   6. set a hotkey for copying links. Once a hotkey is set, if you didn't select an annotation you can copy ALL of them by default.
      [I set mine to ctrl+shift+C using the hotkey menu in obsidian.
   7. there are TON of other optional features so I might recommend spending some time exploring too ^^
      

3. Now under 'custom copy formats' Include a new 'quote in callout' option under "custom copy formats" section of PDF++
   

This is the format I use which causes obsidian notes to render like this:

> [!{{calloutType}} ] {{linkWithDisplay}}
>>**Quote**: _{{selection}}_
>
>>**Comment**:  {{comment}}

[Dennyyusuf]

Thank you @samanthavenialogan , for giving me thorough, step-by-step guidance. I appreciate the effort.

However, I wonder why, after annotating the PDF with comments, I still can't put the comments in the Markdown file. I already used your template. It just unable to copy the annotated text with the comment.

[!{{calloutType}} ] {{linkWithDisplay}}

Quote: {{selection}}

Comment: {{comment}}

[samanthavenialogan]

Hmm, it's plausible you're running into the same problem I was with the PDF that you're using and the PDF is actually not able to be pulled from, but we wouldn't be able to rule out simpler issues first to be sure that's the case.

So starting with the basics (I know, frustrating) can you please provide some screenshots on what you are doing right now? Then tell us what you expect to happen, and lastly what is happening? We'd love screenshots, or even better a video if you're willing ^^

Additionally, if you could share the PDF I'm happy to give it a go on my side since we know that my implementation works. If I can pull them we can narrow it to the implementation, instead of mucking around with the PDF.

[Dennyyusuf]

Hello Samatha Thanks for your feedback.
Yes I thought so after reading above discussion.
https://www.veed.io/view/6d1be3b1-7678-49a1-b9fb-a94d67167b75?panel=share

[samanthavenialogan]

@Dennyyusuf WOW YOU HAVE A LOT OF PLUGINS XD Have you tried running PDF+ in the sandbox to make sure another plugin isn't interfering? I had another PDF reader installed a few months back and it was trying to do both systems at the same time - it broke things that I discovered when @RyotaUshio was asking me to do sandbox.

Thanks for the video and I'm sorry I didn't respond so long. I haven't visited GitHub in a LONG time, because I've been so waterlogged with the Ph.D. Is the problem still persisting at the moment?

Assuming that it is still a problem, I think the big issue is that your comment systems are not being pulled as a comment by default because you copied the 'quote in callout' for a single comment under the comments format (bottom right in the image posted) and your default is also on 'page only' When you pasted the comment if followed the template for your page only listing instead of comment.

The easiest way to see if this is the case is to set your global copy/paste to comment, and then copy the global one. If that copies in comment format then its likely your selection default that's doing it. Once you change that selecting default to match comment instead of page only it should follow the comment template instead of the page template.

__________________________________________________________________________________Change this to comment ^

I will note that this is conjecture if I'm honest, and I am personally experiencing a potentially related issue that I hope @RyotaUshio can fix in which copying all comments in a PDF will pull all over the highlights but it will not pull all of the comments unless the window actually has the comments loads as I've outlined in this issue: #223

Effectively if the window isn't loaded the highlights come through but the comment does not. I haven't seen the behavior that you're suggesting but it may be worth opening the document in Adobe, scrolling to that page, and trying again with the PDF clearly loaded in Adobe and Obsidian and on the window displayed.