Annotations, Highlights in PDFs

Hi, what if Pleco included the reader engine of a PDF reader like Readdle's PDF Expert, combining its highlighting functionality with access to Pleco's Dictionary and Flashcards engine? Or will Pleco appear as an extension to PDF Reader or any other app, allowing full access to Pleco's functionality that way? I think as of now, extensions can only be reached through the Message center, which would still require too many taps. The ideal would be a tap-hold on a word in any app to get a popup bubble with Pleco in it, or the ability to jump to Pleco. Thanks!

Our current PDF engine theoretically supports highlighting, but we haven't bothered to enable it yet since we don't support highlighting in any other document types at the moment; when we add highlighting we want to do it in an integrated way and not something that only works in PDFs.

Extension access to Pleco from another PDF reader would indeed be dicey, though we're hoping Apple improves this in iOS 9. (would actually work in Safari but that's about all it would work in and we think overall the experience of our own Web Reader is far better)

Thanks! Just curious: Will the highlighting be saved inside the PDF/Word file? That would be important for using files with other apps or passing them on to other people without Pleco. For text files or RTFs or epubs, I guess the highlighting has to be saved in a separate file. Perhaps only for PDFs, the highlighting can realistically be saved inside the file.

If I have Pleco set to Night Mode, PDFs will show inverted as expected, but Word files will still be white. Was that because more of the Word display engine comes from the OS?

The current plan is to save it with our own system (but probably support some sort of mechanism for sharing your highlights with other Pleco users) - we're aiming to integrate this with other areas of Pleco (flashcards, e.g.) so it's not really a situation where a general-purpose solution would do.

And yes, Word files aren't inverted because they're done by the OS (though we're trying to find a hack to let us invert them anyway).

Come on, Pleco! Your plan to save annotations within your own system is truly awful. I'm a China scholar who needs to read Chinese materials all the time. Annotating paragraphs is essential for any researcher. Now, what good is it if I can't export the highlighted pdf so that I can work with it using apps like Papers and Sente?! And: why not turn on the pdf annotation functionality right away?

Currently, I'm looking for alternative apps. The needed functionality is very simple to implement indeed. Unfortunately , other pdf reader apps rely on Apple's built-in Chinese dictionary...

It's not simple, actually. There's a hefty extra license fee involved, for one thing - would be a waste of resources to pay that when we're planning to replace it with our system anyway. And as far as I know you're the first person ever to ask for the ability to add annotations that are usable in other apps; we'll certainly file it as a feature request but it simply isn't something that's come up much so far. Even within our PDF reader specifically there are other requests that are much more popular (hide-able toolbars, e.g.).

Also, being able to attach a PDF annotation to a flashcard and reference that later is something that a LOT of users would find useful - indeed for many of them it would be pretty much the whole point of having annotations. So it's very much a central purpose of our annotation system and something we need to design that system to accommodate.

Thanks for your swift response. I don't get it: why do you have to pay license fees if you want to implement a simple annotation feature which you can find in every pdf reader I'm aware of. Maybe I didn't communicate my idea clearly: I was asking for the ability to save the annotations within the PDF itself—the way the Preview app on the Mac does it. Then you could save or export the annotated document to Dropbox. That's it! To whom would you pay licence fees? To Adobe?

As for being the first to request this feature, I think a lot of people are not aware of the possibility to use Pleco for reading Chinese materials instead of, say, iAnnotate or pdfExpert. I know a lot of Sinologists. All of them use Pleco only as a dictionary. Many are surprised to find out even about the Flashcard functionality. My friends use dedicated PDF readers on their iPad or print out articles. Then, they open Pleco on their iPhone to look words up...

I see it’s a bit of a balancing act. What do you think about the possibility of „flattening“ PDFs for exporting to other apps? That way, you could implement your own system tailored to Pleco but also offer an export path for those PDFs that have been completely annotated/highlighted. After that, Pleco wouldn’t be able to add highlights/annotations, but other apps would.

I think the reason why the request hasn’t come up so far is that annotations/highlights aren’t possible yet. As soon as they will be, I would guess there are going to be many requests.

Just my $0.02. An integration between GoodReader and Pleco would be awesome. GoodReader is an fantastic PDF app and would be great to be able to transparently use the functionality of Pleco within it, and vice-versa. But, I admit I have no clue how much difficulty an integration would be.

@Nabil - we license our PDF viewing system from a third party vendor; the fee we pay them now is for a version without annotation support, adding that support would cost more. In theory we could cover the cost by offering annotation support as an additional paid add-on, but I expect a great many users would feel that they were being nickel-and-dimed after already paying quite a lot for our document reader, so the question is whether that (not insubstantial) fee would be made up for by additional sales of the reader to people who wouldn't have bought it otherwise, and I'm not sure if it would be.

@Shun - possibly, yes. And if they do become popular we might consider adding the ability to export / save annotations attached to the document (perhaps we could even find a way to tag them so that they would remain editable within Pleco too). Certainly a popular Pleco-developed annotation feature would improve the case for shelling out for non-proprietary annotation support.

@JD - not really possible within the limits of iOS, at the moment, but perhaps in iOS 9 there'll be official support for Define extensions to along with the other classes of extension they offer now.

Suggestion (Prices just to convey the concept):

Pleco Reader Basic: $15
Pleco Reader Plus: $25
Pleco Reader Basic to Plus upgrade: $10

New users can choose basic or plus, and upgrade later if they decide they want annotation.

@Alexis - Sure, but that's not going to counter the feeling of nickel-and-diming - people already get irritated about OCR and the document reader being separate purchases (as you need the former to deal with scanned PDFs), and we also get regular angry emails from people who bought a bundle 5 years ago and are upset that they didn't get the same features then that they would get from buying it now.

Hi Mike,
I thought I also quickly chime in. I see your point that on the business side of things PDF annotations would make things more complicated. Still, for me direct annotations in the PDF or at least the possibility to export a PDF with the annotations included would be very useful too.
Like others I am using my iPad to read all journal articles I have to read for my research. The articles are synced via my citation manager between the iPad and my computer, making it easy to always access my annotations and removing the need to travel with folders of printed out articles…
For Chinese articles, I have been using Pleco reader, and it would be great if I could use it to highlight text too. And regardless whether using the Reader for academic articles or to read books - I think it is always good to have a platform independent way to export annotations (should they be implemented). I would not want to invest a lot of time doing annotations that will be "stuck" in a specific software (bad examples for this are Mendeley or Sony Reader).

As a further thought, I am not sure what kind of annotation support other users requested, or what kind of internal database you have in mind. I imagine that both usage types are quite different and do not overlap much: For users who use the Reader with the main purpose of understanding an document it makes sense to have the annotations saved in the document, and the main type of annotation will be highlighting and notes. Users who rather use the Reader to learn Chinese might want to excerpt text and save it in Pleco (if I understand you right). Then, not the document but the language itself is the main object, and other (annotation) tools would be used.

Reasonable enough - they are two pretty different usage cases, people who are annotating documents in order to help them learn Chinese and people who are learning Chinese in order to help them annotate documents

Jumping into a dormant thread to add my vote for a PDF highlighting/annotation option, even if it does end up costing a bit extra: at long last, I've found a way of dealing with color-coded PDF highlights between iPad (PDF Expert, though I might end up looking at GoodReader instead) and Mac (via Highlights.app) that doesn't make me want to put my eyes out, and it would be extra-awesome if I could work Pleco into this as well.

Thanks - actually, our PDF library on Android just added annotation support recently so this has become a good bit more viable thanks to that.