Sync notations and free lines on pad to the original document

When making some editions to the attached document on iPad, either highlight or free lines, I can’t sync the edition to my computer. I hope the attachment could also be shared all by computers, iPads, and the Endnote Web account.

Improving iPad PDF annotations is one of our top EndNote priorities for this year. We are working on this now but this is not a quick win and will take several more months of work to get right.

Jason Rollins, the EndNote team

This is good to hear, Jason. Can you tell us how it will work? I.e. will freehand annotations be visible in EndNote or will annotations be more limitied (i.e. only highlighting).

To the OP: I am using GoodRead for iPad annotations and it works really well (via the “Open in…” command in each app). The resulting annotations will not be visible in the iPAd app, but in the desktop app. This is an extra step or two, but it really takes only 10 seconds or so.

Currently we are investigating several different options for improved PDF annotations in EndNote for iPad. There are software tool kits that we can hopefully license and drop into our iPad app. These were not available when we started the EndNote iPad app project so we added the current “Ink” annotations as a stop-gap measure.

Regardless of which solution we choose, the goals will be the folowing:

  • Annotations must be “native” PDF annotations that are visible and editable in iPad and desktop versions of EndNote and in most other standard PDF editing tools

  • Enable conversions of the current “Ink” hand-drawn annotations to “native” annotations - so all of the work folks are doing now does not get lost

  • Add more annotation options on iPad - text boxes, etc.

In the meantime, as noted here is various discussion threads, it is possible to “Open in…” another dedicated PDF annotation app to make changes to PDFs and then save them back to EndNote. This is not the perfect, elegant solution that all of us want but it really only takes a few extra clicks.

Please keep the input coming - we are listening!

Jason Rollins, the EndNote team

Thank you for listening!  I love the ‘ink’ method of annotation on my iPad, but yes it would be even better if I could see what I do when I open the pdf on my laptop.  I know there is currently the option on iPad to erase the whole page of annotation, but what about having an eraser tool to just erase parts, can that be added?

Coming up on 10 months since the last post, any updates as to timelines for improved annotation on iPad?

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The coding and testing is all complete for this we are just working through the submission process with Apple and hope to have this all live very soon.

Jason Rollins, the EndNote team

I love the new version and the ability to highlight!  Much appreciated.  However, sometimes when I go back into an attachment I recently annotated, either just minutes before, or hours, or days before, all annotations get deleted.  Gone.  Hours of work!  Very frustrating.  Today it just happened again, only this time, for the first time ever, I watch them disappear.  Meaning, I opened an attachment, so the color highlight for a fraction of a second, and they were gone.  Scroll to the next page, see the mark ups, and watch them flash out of existance.  Can’t get them back.  Any idea what’s going on?  This has been happening for about one year, even when I used the older version of the iPad app.  I try to prevent it by closing out of a file after marking up so many pages, syncronyzing, and going back in.  If the annotations are still there, great I keep going.  When they’re gone, at least I only lost a few pages to redo instead of the entire 35 page journal article.  Please help!

This isue is still happening.

I highlight text on my iPad the night befor and sync it. The next day I start EndNote on my computer and open the refereces pdf after the program synced automatically. The highlights are nowhere to be found. When changing to another reference EndNote asks if I want to save the changes I did to the pdf. I obviously did nothing but I guess the program knows something is happening but obviously is making the wrong conclusions.