Please consider increasing the PDF size limit. I'm guessing it's about 100MB, and I have plenty of PDFs that large or larger. I'm using 2.0.53 on Windows
Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
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Re: Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
#22Please consider increasing the PDF size limit. I'm guessing it's about 100MB, and I have plenty of PDFs that large or larger. I'm using 2.0.53 on Windows
Which limit are you hitting. There's no inherent size limit but uploading 100Mb would take a minute or two.
Re: Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
2.1 is going to focus on Zotero integration. We're working on two main changes. One is double the ability to export your Zotero and import it, including metadata, into Polar. The other is to just open the PDFs directly but I don't think we can get the metadata that way unfortunately.
Very interesting. So would you potentially see Polar as being able to create bibliographies from the metadata? Or just storing it?
Possibly in the future. Right now we just want to store it so you can sort by journal, author, etc. That and you can search for those too. The issue is some researchers have a lot of PDFs and this metadata helps them manage them.
We might be able to manage bibliographies inside of Polar but we don't have plugins like Zotero so that it would work in MS Word or Google Docs, etc.
Re: Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
#24I’ve seen this publicized many times on HN before, mostly in comments, but I always dismissed it because it supported only PDF and didn’t support ePub (the format I primarily use, since I’m not in a field where PDF is mandated or necessary).
Since this new release has ePub support, is it possible to use it without the cloud and subscription?
Edit: From other comments here it seems like 2.x is cloud-only (and tied to the Polarized service storage). Though it says that there’s a latest update to the local supporting 1.x, I doubt if that would remain supported for longer (of course, someone could say it’s open source, so just fork it).
I wouldn’t mind paying a small license fee for the freedom of local storage or being able to use another cloud storage along with better support. Since 1GB on the free tier is not enough for me and since I have other cloud storage already available, even the Plus plan it quite expensive for me.
Re: Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
#25I’ve seen this publicized many times on HN before, mostly in comments, but I always dismissed it because it supported only PDF and didn’t support ePub (the format I primarily use, since I’m not in a field where PDF is mandated or necessary). Since this new release has ePub support, is it possible to use it without the cloud and subscription? Edit: From other comments here it seems like 2.x is cloud-only (and tied to…
Cloud is required. Mobile was a big feature request and we can't support mobile without cloud.
Subscription isn't required for < 1GB of documents.
Re: Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
#26Also, you guys were asking about Firefox support so I did a deep dive and we're ready go to but Google Firebase doesn't support the moz-extension URL scheme. Just the chrome-extension scheme.
I added a feature request for them to support chrome-extension here:
https://github.com/firebase/firebase-js-sdk/issues/4002
I'm going to submit a PR to them to support moz-extension too.
Re: Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
#27This looks phenomenal. I'm a huge Anki fan so I'm intrigued by the Anki integration.
Two issues/questions though:
1. How do you import flash cards into Anki? After adding the AnkiConnect add-on the documentation just says to use the "Sync Flashcards to Anki" within Tools but there is no Tools (on the Web App / MacOS versions). I can see it being done in the old version of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2aMWBdZUeQ&t=636
2. When importing using the Polar chrome extension I ran into a bug. When importing this page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Carlsen) the page mark feature is completely broken. Once you drag it below the top picture it shoots all the way to the bottom, rendering the feature useless. This didn't happen on the few other pages I tested it on though.
I also think the formatting could be a bit improved -- but I'm sure that's extremely difficult. I was preferring the formatting offered by uploading the pdf created by this converter (https://www.web2pdfconvert.com/).
Regardless this seems fantastic, great job!
Re: Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
#28I tried Polar 1.X but unfortunately I couldn't make it work on Windows. Might try again in the future. Sticking with Calibre for now.
Re: Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
#29This looks phenomenal. I'm a huge Anki fan so I'm intrigued by the Anki integration. Two issues/questions though: 1. How do you import flash cards into Anki? After adding the AnkiConnect add-on the documentation just says to use the "Sync Flashcards to Anki" within Tools but there is no Tools (on the Web App / MacOS versions). I can see it being done in the old version of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F…
> 1. How do you import flash cards into Anki? After adding the AnkiConnect add-on the documentation just says to use the "Sync Flashcards to Anki" within Tools but there is no Tools (on the Web App / MacOS versions). I can see it being done in the old version of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2aMWBdZUeQ&t=636
Where did you see that? The directions might be stale somewhere. I checked our site and it's not there. It's in the overflow menu in the toolbar (the three dots on the top right).
It only works from the Polar desktop app though.
> 2. When importing using the Polar chrome extension I ran into a bug. When importing this page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Carlsen) the page mark feature is completely broken. Once you drag it below the top picture it shoots all the way to the bottom, rendering the feature useless. This didn't happen on the few other pages I tested it on though.
Thanks. I'll use this as a test candidate. The EPUB pagemarks have a rare but I can't really duplicate that seems to happen like 5% of the time. I might work on a different implementation.
> Regardless this seems fantastic, great job!
Thanks! Keep the feedback coming as we rapidly iterate. Usually pushing 2-3 releases per week!
Re: Show HN: Polar 2.0 – Integrated reading environment for EPUBs, PDFs, & web pages
#30Does the desktop app work with the cloud or can you keep everything local? I have tons of pdf files that are local and don't want to put them online.