PDF reader, highlighting

[Jan Erik Christensen]

As a researcher, it would be very useful for me if I could highlight the Chinese text I am reading in the PDF reader.

 

[mikelove]

The company that makes our PDF viewer library recently added annotation support on Android, so now this is mostly just a question of money, since the annual license fees go up if we add annotation support. I'm not sure if we'd make enough money to cover the higher fees from increased reader add-on sales alone, so we might be better off making PDF annotations a separate add-on top of the reader add-on, but then that might seem like we were starting to nickel-and-dime people.

Or we might consider adding more limited annotation support directly ourselves, but then that would be something proprietary to Pleco so you wouldn't be able to print your annotations / share them with other PDF viewers / etc.

 

[bokane]

Chiming in late on this one to add another note of support for PDF highlights. For me, being able to share highlights with other PDF apps (or at least to export them to text/e-mail/Markdown/whatever) would be pretty key; suspect that the same would be true for a lot of other grad students. I'd be willing to pay, but I understand the concern about nickle-and-diming.

 

[mikelove]

Email export would be a lot easier, in fact almost trivial as we're already collecting all of the relevant information for our centralized bookmarking / annotation feature (which we do plan to extend to PDFs); the main problem is in making annotations we can share with other apps, which requires either a deep dive into PDF format (an extremely quirky / troublesome beast) or paying for a third-party library that does the job for us.

 

[pdwalker]

You'd be better off using someone else's library. If it costs more, then make it an add-on and you can explain why that is.

Getting into it yourself is not worth your time as you don't need to be a "pdf format" expert and you're not in the business of supporting the PDF format - unless, of course adding support and saving those licensing costs is going to net you a lot of money. I doubt it though.

 

[mikelove]

If we were making them share-able we'd use a separate library, yes - certainly not worth getting into that ourselves. But doing annotations that only work in Pleco would actually be pretty easy.