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[resolved] No longer able to annotate PDFs on iPad


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With the recent upgrade, I can no longer annotate a pdf.  This was a major feature that caused me to become a premium member and it has worked fine for years.  What has happened?  Is there something I am missing here?  I am still able to annotate pdfs on my iMac and oddly on my iPhone but not on my iPad???

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Experiencing the same problem.  Still available on iPhone X (iOS 13).  Not available on iPad 8 (iOS 14).  Acrobat versions are the same on each device.  EN version on iPhone is 8.24.6.370571.  On iPad 10.0.2 (1104698)  My devices are all set to auto update.

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8 minutes ago, wesk said:

Experiencing the same problem.  Still available on iPhone X (iOS 13).  Not available on iPad 8 (iOS 14).  Acrobat versions are the same on each device.  EN version on iPhone is 8.24.6.370571.  On iPad 10.0.2 (1104698)  My devices are all set to auto update.

This seems to be an EN upgrade issue.  I followed up and forced an update to the iPhone and it inherited the function of the iPad.  Now they both don't function as they have in the past.  It is possible to annotate but it creates another file that gets saved outside of EN and the source note.  At least that appears to be the case.

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  • Solution

It works in EN iOS 10 as well:

  • Open the note
  • Click on the edit button
  • Now click on the pdf
  • There will 3 more buttons show up over the soft keyboard. The left (an "a" in a circle) opens the pdf in annotation mode.
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20 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

Personally I think there is more work to be done to make the annotation tool great again.

But at least it is working.

AMEN-annotating PDFS have always been not so stellar in EN- 

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1 hour ago, u352 said:

Have you experienced problems using the apple pen and navigating in the EN annotate mode? The two figure navigate feature seems to have gone away.

Like the rest of this release,  annotation is a half-baked mess.  

First, after using this tool for 10 years I had to search here on the Forum to discover that annotation hadn’t been completely removed, you just need to click Edit first, before tapping on the pdf.  This is not intuitive.  Indeed, what exactly is the point of the unintuitive flashing “Edit” button?  They clearly didn’t finish coding this feature, or the developers didn’t actually use it.  

Second,  the tools themselves are still as unintuitive and clunky as in the previous mode.  Look at the annotation capabilities of OneNote, Notability, PDF Expert, or even Apple Notes— Evernote is light years behind and has done nothing to catch up.  These tools pre-date the Apple Pencil. 

Third, there doesn’t appear to be any zoom capability.  This makes some pdfs impossible to read. Thus the tools (pen and text) are ten times larger than they should be relative to the document being annotated. So, using the Apple Pencil or finger is pretty much useless. Even typing text yields a ridiculously large font which must be adjusted.  The text box runs off the side of the page. Warning:  if you save it, any text running off the side of page is not saved. 

Fourth,  I have encountered frequent freezing and instability, even in brief testing. 

Conclusion:  Just as with Sketch, Evernote has taken a marginally useful tool and, rather than improving it, has rendered it completely useless.  But hey, don’t worry, they are working on fixing it....  Meanwhile adopt other tools.  

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I couldn't have said it or captured the problems Im experiencing better so THANK YOU!! I too am a long time user and have always thought the handwriting and annotation sucks on EN but like you I have so much in my EN that I didn't want to go through the hassle of changing so I have used other tools-Notability, Noteshelf Penultimate(an EN Product) and now am toying with Liquitext. 

Im almost willing to accept that EN is just a place to capture docs and type notes in but this last update was poorly executed.

 

Once again Thank you for being more eloquent than my note.

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23 hours ago, bigtelco said:

Like the rest of this release,  annotation is a half-baked mess.  

First, after using this tool for 10 years I had to search here on the Forum to discover that annotation hadn’t been completely removed, you just need to click Edit first, before tapping on the pdf.  This is not intuitive.  Indeed, what exactly is the point of the unintuitive flashing “Edit” button?  They clearly didn’t finish coding this feature, or the developers didn’t actually use it.  

Second,  the tools themselves are still as unintuitive and clunky as in the previous mode.  Look at the annotation capabilities of OneNote, Notability, PDF Expert, or even Apple Notes— Evernote is light years behind and has done nothing to catch up.  These tools pre-date the Apple Pencil. 

Third, there doesn’t appear to be any zoom capability.  This makes some pdfs impossible to read. Thus the tools (pen and text) are ten times larger than they should be relative to the document being annotated. So, using the Apple Pencil or finger is pretty much useless. Even typing text yields a ridiculously large font which must be adjusted.  The text box runs off the side of the page. Warning:  if you save it, any text running off the side of page is not saved. 

Fourth,  I have encountered frequent freezing and instability, even in brief testing. 

Conclusion:  Just as with Sketch, Evernote has taken a marginally useful tool and, rather than improving it, has rendered it completely useless.  But hey, don’t worry, they are working on fixing it....  Meanwhile adopt other tools.  

please post a feature request for any single thing you're missing - and we can vote then

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On 10/7/2020 at 6:00 PM, bigtelco said:

Like the rest of this release,  annotation is a half-baked mess.  ...

Second,  the tools themselves are still as unintuitive and clunky as in the previous mode.  Look at the annotation capabilities of OneNote, Notability, PDF Expert, or even Apple Notes— Evernote is light years behind and has done nothing to catch up.  These tools pre-date the Apple Pencil. ...

Conclusion:  Just as with Sketch, Evernote has taken a marginally useful tool and, rather than improving it, has rendered it completely useless.  But hey, don’t worry, they are working on fixing it....  Meanwhile adopt other tools.  

Maybe it helps (can't test it myself because traveling at the moment) to turn off the scribble feature of iOS 14. At least it helps with the EN sketch feature - it seems there is a conflict between the OS trying to interpret pencil strokes by scribble, and the app trying to grab the sketch.

Not a Solution, because it is no good to be forced to decide between scribble and sketch / Pencil use in EN.

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Oh my gosh this is killing me. I used the annotate feature ALL DAY for work and now it's been rendered completely unusable and now I have to figure out an entirely new workflow or system.

Worst of the revamp is that I can't zoom and I can't scroll.

I wish the app hadn't updated 😞

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I agree with Stoppa.  After trying to annotate a pdf using iPad, I was able to access the feature but in my opinion it has been rendered practically useless.  I switched back to the iMac to complete the annotations.  No longer possible or obvious how to do it on the iPad.

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When I try to annotate PDFs on my iPad using the newly prescribed procedure, I get the following error.  I would never have renewed my premium subscription in late September had I known this was just around the corner.  This has ruined a major feature of premium for me.EFE007F7-D7C5-45F1-824D-CBF1A72AFFB2.thumb.png.25db5b9c45fe4bfc4f31287252fea090.png

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22 hours ago, boogius said:

When I try to annotate PDFs on my iPad using the newly prescribed procedure, I get the following error.  I would never have renewed my premium subscription in late September had I known this was just around the corner.  This has ruined a major feature of premium for me.EFE007F7-D7C5-45F1-824D-CBF1A72AFFB2.thumb.png.25db5b9c45fe4bfc4f31287252fea090.png

@boogius Thank you for reporting this issue. Would you help me with additional details to understand the problem better - Is annotation failing for all PDFs or this particular pdf? Also, would it be possible for you to share a sample pdf where annotation is failing? Thank you

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2 hours ago, Jaya Shekarraju said:

@boogius Thank you for reporting this issue. Would you help me with additional details to understand the problem better - Is annotation failing for all PDFs or this particular pdf? Also, would it be possible for you to share a sample pdf where annotation is failing? Thank you

Not every pdf exhibits this response.  I'm not sure what is different between the ones that work and those that give the posted error.  Sorry, I am unable to share the content of the pdf that gives this error.

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When a pdf is copied from website and pasted, it can be pasted as a hyperlink and not as a true resource. You will not be able to annotate such pdfs. We are aware of this issue and working on improving the copy paste experience. In the meantime, as a work around, you should be able to download that pdf on to your device from the web and then attach it into Evernote. This should let you annotate it. Thank you for your patience. 

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2 hours ago, Jaya Shekarraju said:

When a pdf is copied from website and pasted, it can be pasted as a hyperlink and not as a true resource. You will not be able to annotate such pdfs. We are aware of this issue and working on improving the copy paste experience. In the meantime, as a work around, you should be able to download that pdf on to your device from the web and then attach it into Evernote. This should let you annotate it. Thank you for your patience. 

Hi @Jaya Shekarraju. Thanks for responding. What you have described is not the issue that is being discussed in this thread. The problem is that the annotation tools are inadequate. They are a terrible step backwards in functionality which is why the users here (including myself) are saying they cannot annotate PDFs. If v10 could annotate the way previous versions could then it would be more functional and adequate. 

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I'm a full-time academic who works at a university. All of my work depends on being able to annotate documents, especially PDFs. I can't do that now. I'm trialling GoodNotes 5. My Premium subscription is due in a month. Unless this is fixed then sadly I'll have to leave Evernote until annotation works again.

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54 minutes ago, Stoppa said:

Hi @Jaya Shekarraju. Thanks for responding. What you have described is not the issue that is being discussed in this thread. The problem is that the annotation tools are inadequate. They are a terrible step backwards in functionality which is why the users here (including myself) are saying they cannot annotate PDFs. If v10 could annotate the way previous versions could then it would be more functional and adequate. 

@Jaya Shekarraju I do not believe that is my issue.  I moved the document from a cloud drive to Evernote.  It is analogous to other files that I can annotate.  So I’m still puzzled why some are accessible to annotate and others give the error message.  Thanks for looking into this.

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I’ve been on Evernote premium for 5 years. I have about 1200 annotated PDFs in Evernote. I have been frustrated for years that if I leave Evernote while annotating a paper on the iPad (for a chat message or a web lookup) Evernote will crash in the background and lose all of my work - the same is true for sketches. But I’ve kept using Evernote in the belief this will be resolved eventually. Now we have this “upgrade” that has utterly mangled the PDF annotation functionality. I am baffled that product managers at Evernote thought this was releasable software.

I spent a few hours looking at OneNote. Unfortunately, while it seems strong in many other areas, it doesn’t really annotate PDFs - just images of the pages. And even more troublesome - you can’t search for content within attached PDFs. Evernote: had the OneNote worked out - there’s an Evernote import tool - I would be gone today, never to return. I don’t have time in my schedule for this nonsense - but I also, most certainly, can’t afford to be without the functionality to manage and annotate my PDFs/notes. 

Evernote: you have my attention until I find a reasonable replacement. Please offer an option to rollback to 8.x or get this resolved immediately. In the meantime, you’re going to bleed professional customers.

If the moderators don’t block it, I love to hear what you all are finding for alternatives.

— Chris

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The End....

This morning, after 10 years of subscriber ship, I finally gave up and moved my database to Apple Notes.  What did I learn?

1. It was amazingly easy. I exported my Evernote notebooks, one notebook at a time to ENEX files on my iMac desktop. I then clicked import in Apple Notes and they uploaded almost instantly. I then moved the notes to appropriately named folders in Notes and ... done.  Several thousand notes to me a half hour. It then took another 30 minutes for everything to upload to iCloud so that they are accessible on all my devices.

2.  Notes is way faster than EN (new version)

3. Search is about equal to EN. OCR works well.

4. The share sheet can be used to save web pages into Notes. It isn’t as sophisticated as the web clipper but it is very functional.

5. Attachments are easily annotated from my iPad with Apple Pencil. 
 

6. Note formatting is better and faster than the “updated” Evernote.

7. Tables are viewable and full featured on MacOS and iOS devices!

8. There is full support for handwriting and new shapes tools.  You can write and annotate within the app.

9. It requires an extra step but you can create reliable links to your notes that can be pasted into other notes, your task manager or elsewhere.

In short, if you are an Apple ecosystem person, there is no reason to continue the suffering.  A clean interface, a zero price and great features await.  
 

This may seem disloyal,  and I will miss the Evernote community, but face it folks, this has been an asymmetric dysfunctional relationship for a long time:

—5 years and virtually no new features?

—Remember awaiting the “new” Evernote and discovering that the only new feature was a redesign of the Mads the Elephant logo?

—Remember having prices jacked up?

— Remember getting “chat” instead of any requested features?

—Remember the removal of useful capabilities like Evernote Clearly?

—Remember all of the promised enhancements to security? A decade on and you still can’t password-protect a note! Remember the policy document that indicated that developers might be reading  our notes?  They later retracted this, but what assurance do we really have?

— Remember multiple versions of the virtually unusable Penultimate?

 

And now, after promising a new improved Evernote, they have launched a feature-disabled Mac app, and fundamentally broken Windows and iOS apps.  

They sold us Evernote branded Fujitsu ScanSnap devices— now they have removed scanner support with notice to users.

They released apps that don’t even allow printing???? What???? 

There is no real communication other than marketing spin. There is no documentation of what is supposed to work and what is in development.  The features that used to differentiate Evernote have largely been lost or broken. Ian Small is now talking about all the enhancements in the future, but what are they?  When?  We waited 2 years for this????
 

While Evernote have taken our money, Apple Notes, Bear, Notion, Notability, Goodnotes, Roam Research and OneNote have been advancing forward rapidly. Evernote meanwhile is remaining pretty much the same or getting worse.  Some folks have used Evernote as a filing cabinet.

After exploring a bit, I’m amazed at how far the rest of the world has advanced. Unfortunately beyond the user community itself, there is simply no compelling reason to stay😢

 

 

 

 

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@bigtelco Thanks so much for sharing this. You've provided an excellent summary of the issues and I feel like you've read my mind. I've been a premium member since 2012 but it's time for me to say goodbye too. I love the solution you've provided. I'm going to keep exploring GoodNotes but your explanation of Apple Notes is very compelling. Thank you thank you thank you.

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@bigtelco I thoroughly agree with your bill of harms and the poor outlook for Evernote. This is a dispiriting moment. I’d much rather have a functional, prosperous Evernote than try to move all this work to another tool. Yet, as you state, we’re not in the first inning of Evernote’s decline - we’re deep into the game.

I’m actively looking for replacements. I’m trying the Apple Notes.app.  Although, Apple is horrible about just dropping technologies that people have put immense effort into content creation (OpenDOC, iWeb, Aperture).

What I’ve found so far:

  • The import was very fast
  • Syncing between devices is good
  • Search, including within the attached PDFs, is very fast even with 1000+ large PDFs.
  • Sketching is a pleasure.
  • Web clipping works great from Desktop Safari via export PDF and on iOS using the “print...” panels ability to generate a PDF who’s share sheet will store directly into a note.
    • Problem: the generated “single page” PDFs don’t preserve the hyperlinks.
    • PDFs exported with “Print...”/“Save as PDF...” do preserver hyperlinks.
  • Giant Problem: It doesn’t appear that annotations made to PDFs with the “Markup tool” (which is excellent) get synced back to iCloud. The modifications persist on my iPad but do not sync back to Mac or iPhone.
    • Markup may take a long time to get synced between devices - but it does show up eventually.
    • The markup tool edits don’t appear to show up under Preview.apps’s “Highlights & Notes” sidebar section.
  • Notes imported from HTML/Evernote Web-Clipper aren’t terribly usable
    • The source URL in the note attributes doesn’t survive import so you have a mangled note and no link.
  • There’s no versioning - if you mistakenly nuke a part of your note, there’s no getting it back.
  • No tags
  • It doesn’t appear you can search a PDF that you’re viewing from within Notes.app

It sure would be great if Evernote would work.

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On 10/25/2020 at 5:37 AM, Chris Huston said:

@bigtelco I thoroughly agree with your bill of harms and the poor outlook for Evernote. This is dispiriting moment. I’d far rather have a functional, prosperous Evernote than try to move all this work to another tool. Yet, as you state, we’re not in the first inning of Evernote’s decline - we’re deep into the game.

I’m actively looking for replacements. I’m trying the Apple notes - although Apple is horrible about just dropping technologies that people will have put immense effort into content creation (OpenDOC, iWeb, Aperture),

What I’ve found so far:

  • The import was very fast
  • Syncing between devices is good
  • Search, including within the attached PDFs, is very fast even with 1000+ large PDFs.
  • Sketching is a pleasure.
  • Web clipping works great from Desktop Safari via export PDF and on iOS using the “print...” panels ability to generate a PDF who’s share sheet will store directly into a note.
  • Giant Problem: It doesn’t appear that annotations made to PDFs with the “Markup tool” (which is excellent) get synced back to iCloud. The modifications persist on my iPad but do not sync back to Mac or iPhone.
    • The markup tool edits don’t appear to show up under Preview.apps’s “Highlights & Notes” sidebar section.
  • Notes imported from HTML/Evernote Web-Clipper aren’t terribly usable
    • The source URL in the note attributes doesn’t survive import so you have a mangled note and no link.
  • There’s no versioning - if you mistakenly nuke a part of your note, there’s no getting it back.
  • No tags

It sure would be great if Evernote would work.

I agree completely.  I had no desire to leave Evernote, and Apple requires a few weird workarounds but I found myself having few viable choices:

--Evernote for iOS is broken and there seems to be no focus on fixing it. 

--Communication from Evernote is nil.

--OneNote, although it has great features, is very inconsistent between platforms, doesn't work well on iPhone  and search is good but not great. Plus, my brief experiment moving some notes from Evernote was an abject disaster. 

--Bear has a great editor and organization system, but really doesn't have the feature set for document management.

--Notability and Goodnotes are great on iPad, but not strong on the desktop and lack organizational tools.

--Notion.  I use it, but it doesn't support Pencil, annotation, and is clunky getting data into it and out of it. 

I have not experienced the issue you described with markup.   

Let's hope that Evernote at least start communicating with users!!!!

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@bigtelco Just updated my post on Apple Notes. My markup is successfully syncing but it’s taking hours not seconds. I’m used to the near live updates in Notes.app. Often my wife and I use a shared Notes.app shopping list that sync so quickly it can become a surrogate chat app.

All of my Notes.app PDF markup are now synced to all of my devices but it took several hours to happen. I can’t tell for sure, but it might be that syncing is only happening when the app is in the foreground.

Still hoping Evernote revamps their product management and brings the tool to it’s full potential, but going to try to get by on Notes.app for now.

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It works nicely with pdf, but the approach is different to EN. I would recommend it for handwritten annotations. You need to import the pdf and open it in a GN notebook (which is in fact a note with many pages). When you put a normal page in Front of the pdf, you can even create notes that are not directly on the imported pdf.

If you want a more editor-style approach, give PDF Expert a try. In the Full version it can even edit the underlying pdf, and it has features like form filling and signing. With larger PDFs it supports table of content and reading markers.

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4 hours ago, Chris Huston said:

@stoppa What’s your assessment of GoodNotes?

I have tried both GoodNotes and Notability.   In terms of overall usability and the quality of handwriting, I would give the nod to Notability, which I still use often for making sketches, handwritten notes and preliminary engineering drawings for my work.  I also found that the Notability’s workflow is more, shall I say, Evernote-like:  New notes go into an Inbox where they can later be processed into folders.  

Why not convert completely to Notability?

1. The Mac desktop app is really not up to snuff.

2. There is no linking function either between notes or to connect notes to my task and project management systems.

3. It isn’t a great typing experience. 

I hope this helps! Good luck!!!!

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4 hours ago, Chris Huston said:

@stoppa What’s your assessment of GoodNotes?

@Chris Huston It's fantastic for annotating and hand writing notes with Apple Pencil. In my opinion it blows away all competition in that regard but it doesn't work as a text editor. Storage and organisation is manageable because you can create folders within folder etc and OCR searching is brilliant. Searching for notes themselves isn't so good.

So at the moment I have a great app for annotation but not a good solution for typed notes. I really like the Apple Notes solution from @bigtelco but my wife and I have been using a shared iCloud account for years (and therefore shared Notes) so it's hard to disrupt that system. As far as I've been able to determine, you can't share a whole Apple Notes account across multiple iCloud accounts - only specific notes. If I can get around that hurdle then I won't need GoodNotes either.

EDIT: The desktop app isn't worth anything more than viewing your files.

Edited by Stoppa
Updating description
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13 hours ago, Stoppa said:

@Chris Huston It's fantastic for annotating and hand writing notes with Apple Pencil. In my opinion it blows away all competition in that regard but it doesn't work as a text editor. Storage and organisation is manageable because you can create folders within folder etc and OCR searching is brilliant. Searching for notes themselves isn't so good.

So at the moment I have a great app for annotation but not a good solution for typed notes. I really like the Apple Notes solution from @bigtelco but my wife and I have been using a shared iCloud account for years (and therefore shared Notes) so it's hard to disrupt that system. As far as I've been able to determine, you can't share a whole Apple Notes account across multiple iCloud accounts - only specific notes. If I can get around that hurdle then I won't need GoodNotes either.

EDIT: The desktop app isn't worth anything more than viewing your files.

Thanks for the feedback. Note on shared Notes.app notes: use a shared folder. We have 3 kids, my wife and I use a shared Notes.app folder for each kid which is far easier to manage than individual notes.

I think where I’m landing now is that I really want to be able to do my markup in any third party app (PDFExpert, GoodReader) and be able to save directly back into the original note (avoiding an export, edit, re-import loop).

Even more fun would be a note taking app whose native format is PDF. That would solve the problem of what happens when Evernote goes apathetic, or Apple breaks Notes - just move all your notes (PDFs) to the next new tool - no loss of formatting, tags, etc.. GoodReader and PDFExpert are 90% of the way there already - they both just need a decent text editor and syncing.

For now, it looks like I’m going to try living within Apple notes,  backfill the 200-300 notes that are WebClipped HTML with Safari “export as PDF” single page PDFs. 

— Chris

 

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  • Shane D. changed the title to [resolved] No longer able to annotate PDFs on iPad
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No tags in Apple notes.

You can create a sort of tagging by writing something like „#tagtext“ into a note, which then is searchable. But there are no tags available in the real meaning, and the tag operations we use in EN to create a multidimensional network of notes do not exist in Apple notes.

It is practically a plain, treetype folder structure.

Even being on Apple devices (nearly) exclusively, it is no option for me. I would call it nice and feature rich, but „under-complex“ for a professional information management. 

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15 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

No tags in Apple notes.

OK thanks, I often feel the reason why I stay with evernote is as a user since 2010 I have so much invested in it that to use anything else is a daunting task.

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On 10/27/2020 at 10:52 PM, Chris Huston said:

I think where I’m landing now is that I really want to be able to do my markup in any third party app (PDFExpert, GoodReader) and be able to save directly back into the original note (avoiding an export, edit, re-import loop).

@Chris HustonI've worked out a halfway decent way to use GoodNotes with a separate note taking system (like Apple Notes). I'm using GoodNotes for document organisation and annotation (PDFs in particular) and OneDrive for storage (iCloud is an option). In GoodNotes I can create a shareable / external link to individual PDFs. In a note taking app, let's say OneNote for example, I'm pasting that external link into the top of the note. Now when I click / tap the link it takes me directly to the PDF in GoodNotes and I can annotate as usual and it's synced across my devices. Obviously the OneNote note is synced too.

Does that make sense? I've been testing it this morning and it seems to be working well.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 10/6/2020 at 9:06 AM, PinkElephant said:

It works in EN iOS 10 as well:

  • Open the note
  • Click on the edit button
  • Now click on the pdf
  • There will 3 more buttons show up over the soft keyboard. The left (an "a" in a circle) opens the pdf in annotation mode.


I am not sure about the 3rd step. Where do I click on the pdf? I do not see any “pdf button.”

When I click on the edit button (the 2nd step), I got this, see the attached image.

 

F62CB848-4663-47E7-8B75-04177F86B159.png

Edited by Aleksandar
Forgot to attach screenshot
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Your screenshot does not show a pdf. It shows a normal note, not an attached pdf file.

This would look like this (iPad Pro 10.5):

885F3C34-13F7-45FC-8413-7A0AE610F4A6.thumb.jpeg.4db4128473f339be5d61ece40d56827a.jpeg

When the note is open like this, click on the blue edit button down on the page. The cursor will be placed in the note, at the top. Click right on the attachment symbol. It will select, and now above of the soft keyboard, 3 icons will show. The left is for annotating, the middle for downloading the attachment, and behind the 3 dots there are more option.

FF7A166B-8CBC-4CA3-8DA9-6B78110EDF88.thumb.jpeg.f4cdbb480eef36b4737a45d9b77f3d38.jpeg

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Thanks for your helpful reply!
 

In the previous version of Evernote, one could share a note and access the annotation tools (Markup, see the attached image below), which would help to save the note as a pdf. (The pdf file would be saved to Files, for instance.) It seems that it is not longer possible to do so in Evernote.

16E3A3CB-C855-4DE1-8C3C-6F3DC627931F.jpeg

Edited by Aleksandar
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It’s pretty easy to markup pdf in old version. Now the pdf can not zoom in and can not save the markup in the same file. Usually ppl release new version for better user experience but Evernote just do the opposite. Now I feel forced to try other notes. It is bizarre to see a great software trying to downgrade itself.

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  • 2 months later...

It's pretty impressive how much worse the annotation feature has become; it's not easy to do that randomly. How can you remove the ability to two finger pinch/zoom/scroll while in annotation mode and think that's an upgrade compared to how it worked previously? 

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  • 1 month later...

Well, that one for me was a Blocker.

There is 2 things that keep me on Evernote

 

1 - Off-line storage

2 - The hability to anotate PDF's on my iPAd.

 

The anotation part it's broken now.

 

time do search for another solution.

 

 

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  • 3 months later...
  • Level 5

The pdf tool in v10 does the job for a quick annotation, like dropping a few words or inserting an arrow or another element. More delicate annotation is difficult, especially because there is no zooming function in annotation mode.

These are my workarounds:

For more advanced annotation I use the PDF Expert app, that allows a complete set of annotations (and other operations) done on a pdf file. Handling is. Ot as Good in v10 as in the old versions - in v10 the pdf Must be exported to the Files app, then annotated, and the reimported into EN, creating a new note (instead of updating the old one).

For handwritten annotations my choice is GoodNotes 5: It allows to import any pdf and use it as a sort of canvas for pencil annotations. Again, to save the result into EN, I must export from GN5 to a pdf, and import this into EN.

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  • 7 months later...
On 10/7/2020 at 6:00 PM, bigtelco said:

Like the rest of this release,  annotation is a half-baked mess.  

First, after using this tool for 10 years I had to search here on the Forum to discover that annotation hadn’t been completely removed, you just need to click Edit first, before tapping on the pdf.  This is not intuitive.  Indeed, what exactly is the point of the unintuitive flashing “Edit” button?  They clearly didn’t finish coding this feature, or the developers didn’t actually use it.  

Second,  the tools themselves are still as unintuitive and clunky as in the previous mode.  Look at the annotation capabilities of OneNote, Notability, PDF Expert, or even Apple Notes— Evernote is light years behind and has done nothing to catch up.  These tools pre-date the Apple Pencil. 

Third, there doesn’t appear to be any zoom capability.  This makes some pdfs impossible to read. Thus the tools (pen and text) are ten times larger than they should be relative to the document being annotated. So, using the Apple Pencil or finger is pretty much useless. Even typing text yields a ridiculously large font which must be adjusted.  The text box runs off the side of the page. Warning:  if you save it, any text running off the side of page is not saved. 

Fourth,  I have encountered frequent freezing and instability, even in brief testing. 

Conclusion:  Just as with Sketch, Evernote has taken a marginally useful tool and, rather than improving it, has rendered it completely useless.  But hey, don’t worry, they are working on fixing it....  Meanwhile adopt other tools.  

It's March 2022, and it's the damn same.

Please recommend a usable tool (non- Evernote) for annotating PDFs? Thx

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  • Level 5

Annotation works, no better no worse than it did in the prior versions. They still use the tools that came with Skitch (available as stand alone app for iOS and Mac), so OK for some quick remarks, less so for extended annotation. 

On iOS you can open any pdf with the files app, and you get an annotation option. This is the most basic way that works independently from any installed apps.

Personally I use PDF Expert both on iOS and Mac if I want to have more and better annotation options. But you need to pay for it, it does not come for free. You can get Skitch for free, that can edit PDFs independently from EN, but with the same limited tools. And then there are a lot of other apps that can annotate a pdf - one example would be GoodNotes 5.

 

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36 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

Annotation works, no better no worse than it did in the prior versions. They still use the tools that came with Skitch (available as stand alone app for iOS and Mac), so OK for some quick remarks, less so for extended annotation. 

On iOS you can open any pdf with the files app, and you get an annotation option. This is the most basic way that works independently from any installed apps.

Personally I use PDF Expert both on iOS and Mac if I want to have more and better annotation options. But you need to pay for it, it does not come for free. You can get Skitch for free, that can edit PDFs independently from EN, but with the same limited tools. And then there are a lot of other apps that can annotate a pdf - one example would be GoodNotes 5.

 

Thank you for the suggestions, I will try them out as well.

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