PDF Reader: Highlighting across page breaks

jryans

Something that often frustrates me when using PDF annotation tools is that most (all?) fail to allow you to create single continuous highlights that cross page breaks.

I can already imagine quite a few technical reasons why this would be complex to achieve, but if I think purely as a reader of a document, the page breaks in a digital document are mainly a historical artifact of the paper we used to use and not relevant to my reading experience. Ideas occasionally start on one page and finish on the next, so I should be able to select an entire block across multiple pages for highlighting as well.

It would be amazing to see the Zotero PDF reader deliver such a feature, as it would be quite unique compared to other PDF highlighting tools.

adamsmith

I think there's another thread on this but I can't find it quickly: the short version is that the PDF standard handles every page completely separately, so there's a reason that basically no existing PDF annotation tool, including expensive tools like Acrobat Pro, is handling annotations across pages. No question it's desirable and I think Zotero has said they'd look into it, but I don't think it's super likely to happen.

jryans

Right, that's an example of exactly the kind of technical reasons I had in mind above... I've previously worked on some PDF translation tools and format viewers, so the complexity is clear enough. :)

Anyway, even with that in mind, it would still be an amazing feature to have.

martynas_b

@jryans Right, it's about technical complexity to do so. There are many things to take into account like eliminating header/footer that gets in the way, exporting those annotations to PDF, etc. And then we have iOS app where the same things have to be implemented as well.

Although, in future versions we'll try to at least somehow group those annotations.