Updating a PDF, keeping the annotations?

hmijail · April 21, 2023

I have a PDF I’ve been annotating. I’ve found an updated version of the PDF.
Can I update the PDF? … while keeping the annotations?
I’d guess not if the annotations are flattened into the PDF, but maybe yes when they live in the Zotero database?

dstillman · April 22, 2023

You can do Show File and swap out the file, but any annotations would be pinned to their positions in the previous file, so they may not line up properly in the new document.

hmijail · October 5, 2023

Would it be possible to offer a mode in which the user can move the annotation to a new position?
And/or, use the stored highlighted text to find its new position in the updated PDF?

dstillman · October 6, 2023

Not easily. It would be, at best, an unreliable, lossy process — if the highlighted text changed slightly, or was moved to be broken across multiple lines (PDF newlines are baked in), or was removed, you'd have highlights that wouldn't match, and it'd be a whole complicated problem of detecting those, communicating them to the user, etc. It's just a really messy problem for something that isn't going to come up much for most users. We might take a patch for it, after reviewing a well-thought-out spec for how it would work, but I don't see it being something we're able to spend time on.

hmijail · October 6, 2023

I see. Yes, sounds nightmarish.
I'm suddenly wondering why PDF is still so prevalent. Ugh...