Koreader

burgarth

Although I love the new PDF annotation system, there is currently a big gap in my workflow, and I suppose in the workflow of many others, because the internal highlights are not supported on Android devices. Personally, I use e-book (Android and non-Android) readers a lot, and without seeing my highlights or being able to add new ones it is difficult for me to study carefully. Currently, I read on a e-book reader and have a laptop open simultaneously, so that I may highlight there; but this is very clumsy. I know that the devs are busy enough with iOS and desktop, but I would like to advertise Koreader as a potential solution. Koreader runs on Android as well as on many e-book devices (remarkable, kobo, kindle,...). It has a similar highlight function to the new PDF reader in Zotero, but instead of using a database, it stores the highlights in a seperate supplementary file for each document. What I have in mind is a Zotfile-like plugin to Zotero which converts from a file with database highlight to koreader format, and back. Perhaps there are others here more skilful in scripting who would be interested in this as well. Perhaps Koreader could even be taught some rudimentary Zotero API to directly become a Zotero client. I am not asking the Zotero devs to jump on this (I expected they are busy enough), but it would be nice to have some better documentation of the annotation format and API so that other devs would be more tempted to take this on. On the longer run, this would also provide a big boost to Zotero, as the annotation format could become some sort of open standard.

hteixeira

I also second this. Having to read a lot of pdfs for academic reasons, being able to do so in a e-reader is essential to maintain good eye health and not strain them so much.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

You might be interested in this plugin for KOReader: Zotero Viewer Plugin
https://github.com/stelzch/zotero.koplugin/

The dev has a discussion thread about it over on the mobileread forum. https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=348678

burgarth

Thanks for letting me know!

ryanwwest

I came to this same conclusion as KOReader PDF reflow is quite good and it works on so many devices (it even works on Linux, MacOS and Windows via WSL). I've spent some time learning about how PDF annotations could be two-way synced between apps, wrote a bunch about it here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=348678&page=2.

There are some challenges to think through mentioned there and I'm wondering if an intermediary 'universal' annotation data may be needed between Zotero, KOReader, and potentially other future apps that maintains a mapping between each app's annotation as each app stores data differently and not always in a unique way (KOReader is worse than Zotero). I might work on building this out if I come up with good solutions for syncing, whether it can be a Zotero plugin vs. needs to be a standalone program, etc., and would appreciate any feedback. Eventually I'd want this to let this support HTML/EPUB annotation too as well as more and more apps which might make the 'universal' datastore make more sense. Related post: https://www.ryanwwest.com/pkm-annotation/.