On Aug 11, 2010, at 5:04, Carl Lee wrote: > Christiaan, > > I went with the alternative method of exporting as embedded PDF and it works > for the most part so I am grateful. > > A few observations to consider for the developer in charge of "Convert > Notes..." in future releases of Skim: > - highlights are converted perfectly > - position/size of text stickies are perfect, but the default note color is > black (probably the only flaw that makes this solution impractical for > appending PDFs over time) :(
I don't see this, the text color is retained (and we really do so explicitly in both steps). So if you lost that information it's somewhere in the intermediate steps (perhaps merging) where we're not involved. It is also related to the fact that Apple's PDFKit has some bugs when it comes to saving annotations (though they won't admit it's a bug, even though they do not preserve data). > - anchored notes are shifted somewhat from their original position (probably > due to the embedding process, causing the anchors to be larger when viewed in > Preview), but icon choice (ie. question mark, filled document) is > preserved---this may cause anchors to drift too far to be useful as I > continue to append more and more PDFs over time I said that anchored notes won't be preserved perfectly, because the Skim anchored notes do not exist in PDF, they're converted to Text annotations, which are somewhat different. > - lastly, boxes and circles have the correct color, but they often show up as > dotted-lines (i.e. right-click>Note Line...>Dash Pattern: 3 2, but the > original Dash Pattern is blank) > I don't know where the dash pattern comes from, some intermediate step must have introduced it, we certainly didn't. As for switching to dashed line style, that's probably due to an annoying change Apple made where they ovverride what we tell them. I'll have that part fixed. Christiaan > For those of you who want to know how I did this: > - Using "Combine PDFs" still throws away the annotations, so you have to open > each source PDF in Preview, then merge with a specific kind of drag and drop > (see TLJ's suggestion in http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=780455) > and then save. > - File>Convert Notes... > > The first suggestion you had definitely sounds more advanced and will > probably exactly yield the desired results if there is a way to directly > modify the annotation page numbers---maybe I'll give it a go some time later. > > Thanks again, > > -Bill > > From: Christiaan Hofman <[email protected]> > To: For general discussion about using Skim > <[email protected]> > Sent: Tue, August 10, 2010 1:47:52 PM > Subject: Re: [Skim-app-users] Preserve annotations after merging two > annotated PDFs? > > > On Aug 10, 2010, at 20:08, Carl Lee wrote: > >> Hi Christiaan, >> >> I tried this and both annotations appear, but both source 1 and 2's >> annotations 'collide' on the same pages in the merged PDF since the >> annotations retain the same page numbers they had when they were created in >> source (i.e. let's say that source 2 has highlighted text on its page 1---on >> the merged PDF, the highlights for this text appear on its page 1 but the >> text isn't in the highlights since it appears after the last page of source >> 1 on the merged PDF). >> >> So I think that the solution is this: can I directly modify the Skim Note >> files to change the page numbers for each annotation to my liking? When I >> open it in a text editor, I mostly see gibberish but there are certain >> intelligible characters such text from my annotation and what appear to be >> pixel coordinates---I couldn't find page numbers though... >> >> Thanks again, >> >> -Bill >> > > Ah, I didn't realize that, but you're right, the page numbers for the second > part won't get shifted. And no, you can't easily edit the file, it's some > binary archive. I guess you'd need to write a Cocoa program to do that (you > can convert it to XML using plutil, but good luck finding the actual page > numbers in there). > > Perhaps an alternative is to export the PDFs with embedded notes, merge > those, and then run File > Convert Notes… on the combined PDF. You may lose a > bit of data when you have anchored notes, but most will come through OK. > > Christiaan > >> From: Christiaan Hofman <[email protected]> >> To: For general discussion about using Skim >> <[email protected]> >> Sent: Tue, August 10, 2010 2:13:34 AM >> Subject: Re: [Skim-app-users] Preserve annotations after merging two >> annotated PDFs? >> >> Before merging, export the skim notes for the two files to separate files >> (File > Export…). After merging, read them in (File > Read Notes…), make >> sure you uncheck "Replace existing notes" the second time). >> >> Christiaan >> >> On Aug 10, 2010, at 9:04, Carl Lee wrote: >> >>> Hi everyone (developers too?), >>> >>> I have two Skim-annotated PDFs (sources 1 and 2) which I want to merge into >>> one PDF in that order (I use CombinePDFs to do the merging since Skim >>> cannot do this for me). Problem is, when I do this, the annotations for >>> both source PDFs are gone in the merged PDF. >>> >>> Q: Is there a way to *keep* the annotations after merging? >>> >>> If there is no elegant solution, here's a kludge that I hope to carry to >>> completion: >>> I have made some progress in that I *can* extract my annotations when I >>> export as "Skim Notes" and save them onto the merged PDF by using "File > >>> Read Notes...", but the page numbers for my annotations in the merged PDF >>> are the same as they were in source---so that source 2 annotations are not >>> in the correct location in the merged PDF. What I want to do is "shift" >>> ALL the page numbers of source 2's annotations by an integer of my choosing >>> (i.e. so that they correctly correspond to the "new" page numbers where >>> source 2 resides in the merged PDF) >>> >>> Please let me know if you have any ideas to make this work---this would be >>> great as I often find myself OCR scanning books one chapter at a time just >>> so I can annotate them in Skim! >>> >>> Thanks! >>> >>> -Bill >> >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> This SF.net email is sponsored by >> >> Make an app they can't live without >> Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge >> http://p.sf.net/sfu/RIM-dev2dev >> _______________________________________________ >> Skim-app-users mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/skim-app-users > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > This SF.net email is sponsored by > > Make an app they can't live without > Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge > http://p.sf.net/sfu/RIM-dev2dev > _______________________________________________ > Skim-app-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/skim-app-users
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