Is SkimCombine restricted to 10.6? It wouldn't open for me in 10.5.
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>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 <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]>
To: For general discussion about using Skim
<<mailto:[email protected]>[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 <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]>
To: For general discussion about using Skim
<<mailto:[email protected]>[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
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