I can’t highlight decently anymore, the highlights are jumbled and the resulting annotations content is totally unusable… I initially thought it was due to how the pdf was built, yet it’s a Manning’s book purchased directly to them though; yet, if you think the way the pds have been created is to blame, can you please specify what is the problem so that I can call Manning about the problem? But If I highlight it with another pdf highlighter, the text and the comments are neat (there might be some but exceptional problematic cases), so most likely is not a problem of the pdf…
I’ve recorded a random simple page. Many previous ones were actuallly much worse, maybe because they had mathematical symbols and code or different formats/sections. But you can see it clearly with a stright simple page like this one. Here it seems it happens at least when italic words are present - which is in all pages.
I’ll try with other documents eventually and report but this one is urgent (and a long book) for me now, and I can’t use it. The worse part is that when you come to organize the notes, they don’t have any meaning, as words are scrambled; in the case of this page, the italiced word is normally included in in a random part in the middle of the annotation; in other cases, specially if highlights are larger, the mess is bigger. Time lost to fix them is actually more than typing the book manually, so it makes MN unusable at least in this kind of documents…
Can you, please, please do something about it, or let me know what I can do? Do you have at least any information of what kind of pdf versions or formats have this undesired behaviour so that one can assess what to do about it?
I’ve tried with the MN rendering instead of the Apple’s one. No difference. Not sure if what I did was what I was supposed to do though. I just changed it on Preferences and highlighted the very same document in the same places (after deleting previous highlights). Tried to upload the document again with the name changed in case the rendering was done when importing the doc to MN, but it doesn’t upload; MN detects it is the same doc and just opens the previous one.
it’s a Manning book, with my name printed at the bottom of every page (they print names so that they make sure owners don’t distribute it) so I have extracted the page (Raaj pp14.pdf (667.1 KB)) I posted in the video, something that shouldn’t be a problem, so that you can have a look at the issue .
Of the 3 Manning’s books I purchased at the same time, it is happening in two of them, but not in the third. It is not only italics, but any word that has a format that is different from it’s surroundings in between a paragraph. Also, if the word (s) is at the beginning the bizarre behaviour doesn’t happen - and I recall seeing it not happening at the end, but I can’t find an example of it now, as most have a dot at the end in the paragraph’s format.
I’ve tried with two other pdf books from another publishing houses and fortunately this problem is not happening in those.
And “more luckily enough”, I got epubs versions from Manning of both problematic documents and they seem to work very well (I’ll see how to import the highlights from the pdf)!
Thanks and best
UPDATE: Oouch! MN features are halfed for epub… I can’t use enhance or recall in the document… Sigh…
Hopefully you can find something in the pdf to fix MN soon or/ but meanwhile please let me know if there is something I can tell Manning about the format or anything I can do with the pdf book to be able to highlight it and use MN main features…
Sorry for the late reply. I've checked with the developers and have concluded that this is due to PDF compatibility issues. It may take a long time for us to resolve such issues, as PDFs are very complex. No worries as we are and will continue looking at better ways to handle PDFs. Sorry about this problem and our inability to solve this problem in the short while.
For now, you could perhaps use the rect excerpt tool. Apologize again for the inconvenience!
Thanks for checking with the developers. The rect tool doesn’t help me here as I need text to work with. Would it be possible that they say what kind of compatibility issues happen with these two pdf? As it hasn’t happened to me with other 5 pdfs, but I need to keep purchasing books from Manning’s as main source now, where I purchased these 2, maybe there is something in the format I can talk with Manning so that they tell me whether the book I’m going to purchase has that or not… They are ebooks and normally you can’t return those.
Also even though MarginNote developers might be at it, it doesn’t seem they are going to solve it soon, and I of course have purchased MN to work on those documents now… so having that feedback from the development team about the format might help me at least to try having a more immediate solution with Manning… I’d really appreciate it if you could get that information from the developers at least…
I am sorry about this situation. I do not know what kind of compatibility issue is it. The thing here is that there are all kinds of PDFs out there, and as MarginNote is not a professional PDF editor (the focus of MarginNote is mainly on taking notes, and we do not deal with handling PDFs directly), it is quite difficult to pin point the exact cause.
There are several solutions for now, you could, for example, use OCR correction of the image to get a text version of the text excerpt. You could also try convert your PDFs into images, convert back to PDF, and then apply OCR (either using 3rd party software or MarginNote iOS's OCR Pro feature) to it so that this problem may top existing.
