Re: Highlighting and annotating PDFs?
On Mon, 14 Aug 2006 00:53:44 +0100
martin f krafft <madduck@debian.org> wrote:
> also sprach Hanspeter Kunz <buzz.rexx@gmail.com> [2006.08.13.2218 +0100]:
> > have a look at
> >
> > http://multivalent.sourceforge.net/
> >
> > sounds promising. never tried it though.
>
> This looks pretty interesting. Thanks.
>
> First impressions:
> - it's Java.
> - Ugh!
> - it starts pretty quickly, even though it's Java
> - the user interface is sluggish. It's Java...
> - there are no quick keys, it's all mouse-based
> - you can create annotations, which are like post-its. You can
> move them around, edit them. This is really nice.
> - those annotations are stored in ~/.Multivalent, indexed by the
> absolute file name. This means I cannot easily move files
> around, or take the annotations with me to another machine.
You can save annotations as into an external file. The problem is that this file
stores the reference to the original pdf as an absolute path, although it is
editable.
> - you cannot load a file from the command line, you have to use
> the GUI to open it. There are no "recent files".
You can do go->history to see the recent files
> - you cannot save any preferences
There seems to be a reference file
> - most of the options, including the highlighting are greyed out.
> I have no idea how to enable them. The documentation talks about
> PDF 1.5, but I can only create PDF 1.4 (ps2pdf14). Not sure if
> that's the cause.
You mark the text and then chose style->background->color or
style->foreground->color. The rest of the styles are also available when text
is marked, but it seems that they only do anything if you apply them to note
text, not to the pdf text.
> - There is no undo. However, the file in ~/.Multivalent is
> pseudo-XML and can thus be easily edited.
>
> So, uh, this is better than nothing, but not much better than
> keeping a plain text file next to the PDF and writing notes in
> there. I can only hope they work more on it, and do it quickly.
>
> Thanks for the pointer though!
>
I've been wanting to write something like this for a while now but didn't have
the time to get around to it yet.
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