@Sushi_Support-Team,
I agree with everything that @Darren noted, above. Better support for exporting to other apps is badly needed. To reiterate what @jprint already noted a year ago: MarginNote needs PDF export with proper annotations, RTF for notes, OmniOutliner, etc.
The current “solution” seems to be that we are to supposed to figure out the undocumented plugin API and write the export code ourselves. I have asked you about documentation for the plugin API, and am still waiting for a response.
Can you give a clear delivery date for completed (i.e., not beta) API documentation? Have you contracted with a technical writer who is a native English speaker to review and edit the API documentation? I hope you will understand that a native check by an experienced technical writer is pretty much a requirement for usable API documentation, and that your team will take a serious, professional attitude towards this.
To be honest, though, I don’t see what your team now proposes is a workable solution for most users. I do not think it is reasonable to ask that we users write our own code for export, and especially not when your team won’t even give us a clear statement about the API documentation. Moreover, is it possible to export PDF files with proper annotations using the plugin API? This is not clear to me. Can you clarify this?
I hope you will give these issues some serious thought and that your team might make a real commitment to give export features higher priority.
One solution would be that your team writes several plugins to get things started, and then we users can modify the code to write our own custom export plugins. That might work, but you will need to make it a priority. You could start by delivering a plugin to export PDF with correct annotations. How about it? If PDF files with proper annotations cannot be generated from the plugin API, you may need to add this to the core MarginNote app.
Right now, I think I can speak for some of the others who have posted about export functionality, that we don’t have a solution in view. Your team has made some vague noises about this, the plugin API was promised, but still nothing is really concrete.
Unfortunately, this situation is somehow very familiar.
There used to be a pretty good app called Sente that was in many ways similar to MarginNote. Have you heard of it?
Just like MarginNote, Sente had nice features for marking up PDFs, through it primarily served as a reference manager. Just like MarginNote, it did not follow the PDF spec for annotations, but instead held all the annotations in a SQL database, and just like MarginNote, it didn’t have working support for exporting PDFs or PDF annotations. Furthermore, just like MarginNote, the users asked many times for improved export, and as with MarginNote the developers of Sente never gave these requests any priority. There was a pattern of poor communication, and then the Sente developers then started lying to the customers about the status of the app. The support staff stopped responding to posts on the forum. A year or so later, the company disappeared, and the users were abandoned, trying to figure out how to migrate their PDF notes to other applications.
This week, @chai46 posted on this forum that s/he felt “cheated of my money and forcefully trapped with a product that doesn’t show any interest to integrate with the greater world of other applications and pdf readers”.
Given the lack of communication and commitment from your team to come up with a workable solution to the problems with export, I can perfectly understand @chai46’s message.
I would hate to see MarginNote go the way of Sente.
In any case, it’s up to you and your team to clearly communicate your plans, and make some commitments about the future.
