Being able to read and highlight PDFs on the iPad is perhaps the single most requested feature for Sente for iPad. We have known from the very beginning that this was going to be a critical feature on which the success of the app would depend. This feature alone has taken almost half of the development time of the entire application, but now that it is done, we are very pleased with the results and we hope that you will be as well.
We were trying to achieve several goals in our design for PDF annotation.
First, we wanted the interface to be clean and unobtrusive. There are some seriously ugly PDF annotation tools out there, and we did not want to be one of them.
Second, we wanted it to be easy to learn and easy to use (of course!).
Third, as in desktop Sente, we wanted PDF annotation to be tightly connected with note taking. Of course, this means including the ability to add notes to a PDF, but it also means (optionally) adding notes to your Sente notes, which are visible outside of the PDF view. This is not something that other PDF tools support.
Fourth, we wanted it to support a number of common usage patterns. This is where the UI design got tricky. Some people like to highlight passages in documents but they are not interested in adding comments or saving quotations for later use. Some like to add comments inside the PDF as an aid to remembering their thoughts on specific passages. And some take copious notes, often with quotations, for use in their own writing. We wanted Sente for iPad to support each of these common patterns in such a way that the user never feels as though they are fighting with the software.
Here is a brief overview of what the PDF annotation and note-taking interface looks like in Sente for iPad, starting with the PDF view showing some text highlighted and a comment marker.
To initiate highlighting, you can either press-and-hold somewhere in the text, or tap on the highlighter icon at the top of the screen and swipe your finger to select some text. Either action places you into Annotation Mode.
When you have text selected in Annotation Mode, you will see an edit menu that includes:
- Highlight
- Comment
- Quote
- Copy
The Highlight option simply highlights the text using the color selected in the toolbar. The edit menu is then automatically dismissed and the user can return to reading.
The Comment and Quote options both bring up a note editor. Notes created here can be either internal to the PDF, or they can also appear in your list of Sente notes for the reference. If you select the Quote command, Sente assumes that you are creating a full Sente note and it automatically adds the selected text to the note as the quotation. If you select Comment, Sente creates either a PDF-only note or a full Sente note, depending on which you created the last time you used this command. You can change the type of any note at any time.
Here is the note editor for a full Sente note (when editing a PDF-only note, the body of the editor is replaced with a single text field for the comment):
When the note editor is closed, the PDF is then displayed with the text highlighted (if a color had been selected in the note editor) and either a "note" icon or a "note-with-comment" icon is displayed in the margin of the document.
Tapping on a note-with-comment icon will bring up a small sticky with the contents of the users comments in it, which can be dismissed by tapping anywhere else on the screen. This also brings up a new edit menu that can be used to make changes to the saved note.
I will discuss Sente notes in a later post, but just to anticipate that discussion, here is a shot of the single reference view after taking some notes in a PDF. In particular, notice the section of the summary entitled NOTES.
And, as you would expect, if you are working in a synchronized library, all highlighting and notes are immediately synchronized with all other copies of the library, both on other iPads as well as on any Mac desktop or laptop computer.
Two questions:
1. How long before the "note-with-comment" icon and the popup sticky makes its way to the Mac version?
2. Any chance that the text notes can include a button that takes you directly to the relevant section of the PDF? (both Mac, and iPad versions, of course).
Thanks in advance,
John
(no relation to the Altman in the sample PDF).
Having no iPad, I've thought numerous times in the course of this year: "jeez, when are those guys at tts finally addressing all those bugs and annoyances that have left untouched since January". And then I thought, "Ok, someday they'll focus on the desktop version again. Now, they need to go into this market, they would be stupid to drop that ball given that they probably have the only reference manager truly based on Cocoa; which is one reason you selected Sente over its competitors, because one day it'll pay out." And now this. Since the nineties, I wanted to get rid of the format disruption between paper printout and digital files. The highlightning feature alone is a sufficient reason to buy an iPad. Congrats.
Hi, thanks for the previews, this feature really looks amazing. One quick question though:
The previw on www.thirdstreetsoftware.com says "In Sente for iPad, passages of text can be highlighted with a swipe of your finger. Draw lines, rectangles or ovals with a tap and a drag on the screen." Is the second part of this, meaning the drawing of lines, rectangles, ovals etc. still a feature that will be part of the first release? I am wondering because it hasn't been mentioned here.
Thanks!
Wow, this is stunning!
Same questions as altman62.
Thanks for the nice comments.
John: the PDF interface on desktop Sente will be completely new in Sente 6.2, which will be released prior to the release of Sente for iPad (this is required for compatibility with Sente for iPad). We expect the popover stickies to be included. There is some chance that this particular aspect will be slightly delayed, but not by much.
John: the support for "jump to location in PDF" has been added to the database already. This feature will appear in the UI in one of the releases not long after the first public version of Sente for iPad.
Andreas: We couldn't agree more with your summary. There are a lot of things that we want and need to do on the desktop that we have been postponing because we feel so strongly about the importance of the iPad as part of an academic reference "ecosystem". It has been a long haul, but we think that in the very near future, people will not even consider using a reference manager that does not provide seamless integration with their iPad.
anitchang: support for rectangle region highlighting is already in Sente for iPad. Ovals, lines, etc. will come a bit later.
Michael
thanks Michael, I am looking forward to using this!
Thanks for the detailed run through Michael. Looks great. One question though. When in Annotation mode, can you just drag over a section of text to highlight it in one action (as opposed to having to hold on text and then drag one of the handles).
Hi Nick
If you first select the highlighter icon at the top of the window, you will be able to simply swipe your finger to select text. Once you do, the edit menu will appear and the selection will have grab handles so it can be adjusted.
Also, if you make a selection using the press-and-hold method, as long as you do not remove the selection, a swipe anywhere on the page will move the selection to that text. This lets you chain from one passage to the next while not having to enter annotation mode explicitly.
Michael
Sounds great Michael. Looking forward to getting stuck in!
Michael, since you brought up 6.2 new PDF features, I thought I'd ask about the whole issue of compatibility outside of Sente. Will all of these highlights and sticky notes be maintained on the PDF such that they appear in Preview, Adobe Reader, DEVONthink, etc? And if a highlight is made in Preview, will the highlight show in Sente?
Hi Danny,
Good question. Beginning in 6.2 and Sente for iPad, PDF annotation will not be stored in the file itself. There are a number of reasons for this, and I will not bore you with the details, but this is driven by the PDF tools that are (and are not) available in iOS. Instead, PDF annotation is stored in the database and applied when viewing.
This has one very important benefit over the approach taken in previous versions: individual annotations can now be synced one-by-one as they are made. The old approach required the entire PDF to be uploaded every time annotation was saved (obviously a very expensive operation).
Of course, people will still sometimes want to see the annotation in the PDF outside of Sente. For this, we are adding a command to export a PDF with annotation included. Obviously, the option to export without annotation is even easier, and this is something several people have requested.
The option to export with annotation will only exist on the desktop at first. When Apple provides the tools needed on iOS, we will add the feature there.
Michael
Thanks for that answer. I confess that I wish there would be more interoperability, but I understand TSS's reasoning and the export feature is a good idea.
Who knows if there is a way to get around this, but my biggest let down with this is that highlights and annotations won't appear on the PDF in DEVONthink. Is there any way to allow other apps to access the annotation info? For instance Skim, which keeps a skim file in teh same folder as the PDF, is accessible by other applications. So in DEVONthink, Skim annotations appear on the PDFs. I'd love to see that kind of thing be possible.
Hi Michael,
while I can understand why this decision was made in regard to iOS, I find it problematic. That the annotation information was store independently of Sente was until now one of the reasons I really liked the program, because it didn't trap the information in one software and format and made it possible to simultaneously access the files with other software. That is why I have some additional questions/suggestions about this:
1. Does this affect Sente's ability to display highlighting saved in the PDF by other software? And if not, how is this treated if it overlays/conflicts with Sente's own annotation?
2. How is the export designed. Will I have to use the command for each individual file/reference, or can I export lots of files at once?
3. A suggestion (which may not be technically possible): I understand that the problem is with iOS mainly. If I understand correctly, the annotations stored in a PDF file itself are some kind of metadata set, that can be displayed or ignored by a software displaying the file (as seen in PDF software that does not support annotations). Would it then not be possible to program a command (for the OS X Version) which "commits/updates" all annotations for the whole library to the PDFs themselves? Sente's PDF display itself could just ignore these annotations saved in the file, but other software (DevonThink etc.) could then use them. Do you understand what I mean?
Thanks!