amcoffin

I use Evernote extensively on my Mac, iPad Pro, and iPhone. We use shared notebooks in my office and I have a ScanSnap Evernote Edition sitting on my desk. (I even have Evernote desk accessories sitting next to the scanner.) I'm pretty well immersed in the world of Evernote.

However, I've found myself turning to other tools, most recently OneNote, with greater frequency. The main issue, and it is a big one for me, is the fragmented and inferior support for note taking and PDF editing in Evernote. I use my iPad Pro with Apple Pencil extensively. There are some great Pencil-compatible apps for iOS, including Notability, PDF Expert, and OneNote. 

Evernote, on the other hand, is stuck with a strange and fragmented approach:

PDFs can by opened using the "Annotate" tool in Evernote, which I think is built around the remnants of Skitch. It's fine for adding arrows and icons, but terrible (unusable) for handwritten notes on PDFs. It really can't be used for anything more than simple highlighting -- certainly not detailed annotation or note taking. 

Drawings and notes can be added to an Evernote Note directly through the handwriting tool, but this simply inserts an image into the note. There's no way to use this tool to take notes over multiple pages, or to use it for annotation as far as I can tell. I've also found it to the buggy, with full pages of notes lost if you switch away from Evernote to another app before saving the image and returning to the normal notes view. I will say that that, though the tool is very limited, with very few options, the Pencil support works well and writing is fluid. This tool seems to have the most potential for future development.

Finally, there is Penultimate -- a separate app I want to love but is just too buggy, too limited, and too walled off from the rest of Evernote to be truly useful. Again, no support for importing PDFs/annotation, yet another approach to handwriting, and, though the Penultimate notes live in Evernote, nothing can be done with them in the main app. 

Why, at this stage, would Evernote have three separate, incompatible and incongruous approaches to annotation/note taking, none of which begin to match the functionality of some of the other apps named?

Attached PDFs can certainly be opened in other apps, such as PDF Expert, but there is no way to get the annotated PDFs back into an Evernote note without deleting the original attachment and reattaching the PDF. That's cumbersome, and annotation seems like pretty basic functionality that Evernote should offer. 

Evernote certainly has some broader advantages over OneNote, but really needs to explore something like the "canvas" style approach used by OneNote. The ability to "print" PDFs to a OneNote page and then markup the document itself and take notes/add text/etc. all on one page is invaluable. I've pretty much switched all note taking/PDF annotation to OneNote, with Evernote still used for project management and other organizational needs, which leaves me with my own fragmentation. 

Maybe I'm missing something in Evernote's approach, but I'm a longtime user that's completely frustrated with Evernote's inferior support for annotation and handwritten notes.