Add new function: highlighter drawing straight lines and underline drawing straight lines

bin38121cn

As we know, the software currently supports freehand drawing, but compared to mainstream note-taking software such as GoodNotes and Notability, they usually support highlighter drawing straight lines, underline drawing straight lines, especially for PDF files. Our software currently does not support drawing methods such as circles and straight lines, and the lines drawn by ourselves are always unable to meet the requirements. It is recommended to add this function, whether it is on the PC side or the mobile side.

martynas_b

Why do you need that? Simply drawing a line instead of creating a proper highlight or underline annotation loses all the benefits of having extracted text.

bin38121cn

Because some of the PDF files cannot be edited and are basically in image form, it is not possible to create direct highlight and underline annotations. Therefore, a highlighter with the ability to draw straight lines must be used

dstillman

It would be better to OCR those and get the full benefits of annotation than to just draw lines on them.

bin38121cn

However, OCR is not suitable for all cases. Sometimes there are strange problems such as misaligned images and text. If the PDF is editable, of course, the general annotation function is sufficient. However, we often encounter scanned PDF files, which require highlighting with straight line drawing or underlining drawing functions

carson.matt

I had no idea that Zotero supports freehand drawing. Does that work on Windows too or just the iPad app?

dstillman

@carson.matt: It's available in the Zotero 7 beta.

documut

"Why do you need that? Simply drawing a line instead of creating a proper highlight or underline annotation loses all the benefits of having extracted text. "


Not all pdf's has to include ocr layer. Or especially handwritten pdf files would be very hard to be OCRed. Currently i am working of that kind of handwritten pdf.

@dstillman

drawing feature is really nice addition but imho needs to be improved. See

1-drawing lines with draw tool creates image file. if i work on a pdf very hard, it creates image files, total size of all images could be bigger than pdf file. this draw tool just need to draw lines with attributes of notes and tags, like highlighter and underline tool. I would like to support zotero by enabling 2GB subscription but i don't want to waste my space with these .png file which created by draw tool.

2-if you want draw tool to act like an underliner and highlighter. we need a shortcut to draw straight lines. if i click "shift" while draw is selected, it should draw straight lines. people can arrange by thickness if they want a underliner or highlighter.

dstillman

@documut: Image annotations don’t count against your storage quota. (The only exception is if you add them to Zotero notes, where they have to actually be stored and synced as images.)

documut

Please also consider my other real world suggestions on annotations to support non-ocred, picture only, read only, unprocessed pdf files. thank you..