Help with flattened highlights in pdf export

I’ve been using the app for a couple of years now, without realising that the format in which it exports means that the highlights cannot be read by other apps.

I realise that you can view them (i.e. see them) but they can’t be recognised and so nothing can be done with them outside of marginnote.

I believe the the technical description of this is that the highlights have been flattened.

I desperately need other apps to be able to read the highlights.

I have hundreds of articles and books that I’ve highlighted, with tens of thousands of highlights !!!

Please could you let me know:

1) if there is any way to get an export of a pdf that does not flatten the highlights?
2) if there are any plans to introduce this feature and if so WHEN???

I’ve looked through the forum and the only query / responses I can see on this topic are:

Marginnote annotations should NOT be flattened in Oct - 2019 - where it seemed that there was some assurance the non-flattening would be adopted

Feature request - Don’t flatten annotations on export - in July 2019 - which also indicated that the feature was on your road map

As I said, I’m desperate not to have to re-highlight the pdfs in another app, in order to have interoperability. IT WOULD TAKE ME THOUSANDS OF HOURS.

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Hello - is there anyone in the company / tech support looking at this board or monitoring support requests?

I’ve sent this request via both email and through this forum and heard nothing.

It would be courteous just to let me / us know if nothing is happening and that we’re left to our own devices.

As I said in the message above, you have indicated in two separate forum responses that non-flattening of pdfs will be adopted. But that was back in 2019.

Living in hope here

Okay this is officially getting a bit annoying.

A week without any response to this request for help.

I’ve used countless other examples of software. I’ve sent in requests to people with a far lower install base than you have.

And I have never, ever had to wait a week for any form of reply.

A simple sentence indicating - we can’t help, you’re on your own is enough.

Anything.

As MarginNote is not a traditional PDF software, but built around the note system, the fact that our PDF rendering is based entirely on the Apple API to achieve, and almost does not provide PDF editing capabilities, export flattened pdf is currently MarginNote’s apple api can not be achieved, we plan to consider the purchase of relevant technology modules in the future mn’s pdf function to do a strengthen!

Can I point out here the two posts that I linked to previously.

July 2019 and October 2019.

In both of these you indicated that you were intending to enable pdfs to be exported unflattened.

As such, excuse me if I am sceptical of your desire to ‘strengthen’ this function.

Please could you let me know how I might get a refund on the purchase of this software.

maybe MN can suggest a workflow around this issue? it seems the whole point of highlighting is to summarize, recall and reuse the blurbs with context preserved. MN should make sure all these steps are achieved with utmost success.