On Aug 13, 2010, at 4:38, Michael Singer wrote:

> Is SkimCombine restricted to 10.6? It wouldn't open for me in 10.5.
> 

Apparently.

Christiaan

>> 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 NotesŠ 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 > ExportŠ). After merging, read them in (File > Read NotesŠ), 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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