PDF Annotation With S-Pen is Fundamentally Unusable

[Novak 0]

What am I missing, here?  Over the past day and a half, with Evernote 10.46 Personal on a new Tab S8+ with S-PEN, I have noticed the following when trying to annotate a PDF within a note:

• Just getting into the annotation screen on Android is a painful exercise in UI exploration and blind luck.  Apparently the way to do this is:
  • Go to the notebook
  • Select the note by touching in the left pane
  • Touch the whitespace *above or below* the name of the PDF in the left pane, but not the PDF itself
  • Then long touch the PDF name in the left hand pane
  • Then notice and touch the circle-a symbol.  
• But make sure not to be doing any of that with the pen itself.  Use your finger, because the pen taps have an unfortunate tendency to be recognized as text punctuation-- a period, a comma, an apostrophe, sometimes a tilde, whatever.  I'm not 100% sure what happens next, but I think that mark is then incorporated into the filename of the PDF itself!  Whatever is happening, the PDF disappears from note never (so far) to return.  Gone.  Vanished.  Dead.
• But if you get past that, you are treated to the worst stylus implementation I have ever seen, bar none, no exaggeration.  If I try to write "hello" in a natural fashion across the PDF, without even worrying about handwriting recognition:
  • I can't get a true black pen stroke, just an anemic grey
  • Aside from that the color palette is woefully limited. 
  • I can't get a usefully narrow penstroke-- the narrowest setting is far too wide
  •  Sometimes a second stroke won't register at all-- am I writing too fast for it?  
  • Sometimes it will assume two sequential strokes are meant to be joined.
  • Sometimes it thinks the second stroke is not a stroke but an attempt to move the first stroke.
  • If the PDF was a white background, there is no visual indication where it starts and stops and the application will cheerfully render the full stroke and then remove whatever was outside the document area in postprocessing a few seconds later.  That one was fun to figure out.
  • There's probably more, I've only been able to annotate documents for a few hours, but that's what I've noticed so far.

This feature cannot possibly be this bad-- as it is, it's worse than not having the feature at all.

What am I missing?  What do I have set wrong in Evernote, or on the Tablet itself?

 

 

[PinkElephant 8,114]

EN is simply not build around a stylus experience. They had purchased an app called Penultimate years ago, but I think it is iOS only, and in fact feels pretty aged now.

The pdf annotation works somehow better on iOS, but still far from being an excellent experience. Plus there is a long running bug on the iPad, not allowing to zoom in to annotate.

All in all, save the pdf out of EN, annotate it there, and bring it back in.

You can send your user experience as well at support, by opening a ticket.

[Novak 0]

They don't have to build the whole app around the "stylus experience" in order to provide competent support.

All they have to do is use the built in OS features, respect the file associations I've already defined, and allow me to open the PDFs through a third party piece of software like Squid, and save in place.  This is not hard.  This is how operating systems work.  No other application on my tablet handles the pen so abysmally, only Evernote. 

The bit with the pen colors and linewidths is purely bush league, like a senior undergrad project demonstrating a proof of concept and then just letting it rot.  The breaking of the filenames (pretty sure that's what's happening) and the loss of access to the PDFs should be mortifyingly embarrassing.  It is an application-breaking error.  If I can't trust the application not to send my data and documents into Never Never Land, I can't-- won't!-- trust it to do anything at all.

 

Quote

All in all, save the pdf out of EN, annotate it there, and bring it back in.

You can send your user experience as well at support, by opening a ticket.

Or I can find an application that works right.  Having skimmed the forum, I can see people have been complaining about related issues for ages and it is manifestly obvious that Evernote are just not professional enough to care.

I'm under no illusions, here.  The loss of my three dollar a month subscription means nothing, in the ultimate scheme of things.  But I'm not paying even small amounts of money for an application that trashes my data willy-nilly.  I'm not even paying for one that doesn't trash my data but is still laughably unusable on my platform of choice.  (Recall, by the way, that PDF annotation is a feature that kicks in only at the paid tier.)  

[PinkElephant 8,114]

Just do what you think you should do. I am another user, and I am unhappy about the weak annotation features using a stylus.

What you write about how simple this is and that must be just shows a deep lack of understanding on your side. The EN app runs isolated from the OS based on a framework. Every OS interaction is a challenge and requires deliberate coding.

If using a stylus is central to your workflows, I think you simply picked the wrong app. Can happen, can be corrected.

[leonardo.cozendey.crespo 0]

man, i have to use noteshelf for annotation and then, transport that to EverNote.

 

As that is a dealbraker for me and i´m not (and will never be) into iOS ecosystem, I won´t probably renew my subscrition next year and will migrate do Onenote or some other app best constructed around Spen usage.

regards, leo