Draw on a PDF Online • Hacker News Board

Re: Draw on a PDF Online

#11

Post by perrys » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

azabua wrote: post #10

perrys wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good Annotations is completely free :)

You can implement your own with canvas and PDFjs ... I did something back in the day with latex and java (yikes) ... but anything is possible ... now I would try socket.io whiteboard example so many could destroy the same PDF

Yep this is how I implemented it on Good Annotations. I used PDFjs to render the PDF as an image data string. I'll checkout socket.io but my understanding of socket.io is that it is websocket technology so i'm not totally sure what you mean.

Something i do want to figure out is server side rendering the PDF vs the client, because I beleive there is a lot of data lost using PDFjs i.e. signatures

Re: Draw on a PDF Online

#12

Post by jessriedel » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 3:27 PM UTC

Somewhat off-topic: Although in this particular case I use Preview on a Mac, this task is in the general category of tasks where every once in a while I need an app to do a slightly unusual thing. I might, say, need something like this once every two weeks, but never the exact same task more than a couple times a year.

Unfortunately, the naive method for one-off finding a rarely used function like this is Googling, but the Google results are SEO'ed to death. The top results are invariably more broken and ad-invested than the best thing out there, but the latter is hard to find.

Any suggestions? By far the most useful tool I've found for this is https://alternativeto.net/, but it often doesn't have what I need.

Re: Draw on a PDF Online

#13

Post by BitwiseFool » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

black_puppydog wrote: post #3

Content warning: strong language I literally just spent an hour trying out different apps on a windows pc to annotate a scientific paper (standard arxiv paper) with a stylus. The results are devastating ... Every app is so broken, hidpi isn't there, font rendering is crap, touch on windows is essentially unusable, many apps didn't even let me un-fullscreen without going back to desktop mode (this is a convertible). I…

How does such a ubiquitous format have such terrible and disjointed editing tools in this day and age?

Re: Draw on a PDF Online

#14

Post by itronitron » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 4:31 PM UTC

perrys wrote: post #8

itronitron wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't tried Microsoft Edge then it's worth a shot. Curious to know if you have used it and how it compared to other applications.

Does Microsoft Edge have annotation tools built in?

Edge has built in tools for drawing on and highlighting a pdf file.

Re: Draw on a PDF Online

#15

Post by subhrm » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

Can't handle multi-page documents properly. You have to enter the page number, after uploading the doc and you can only annotate that single page.

Re: Draw on a PDF Online

#16

Post by sauwan » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 7:06 PM UTC

black_puppydog wrote: post #3

Content warning: strong language I literally just spent an hour trying out different apps on a windows pc to annotate a scientific paper (standard arxiv paper) with a stylus. The results are devastating ... Every app is so broken, hidpi isn't there, font rendering is crap, touch on windows is essentially unusable, many apps didn't even let me un-fullscreen without going back to desktop mode (this is a convertible). I…

I had the exact same experience. It's intolerably bad on Windows.

Can you give me an idea of what worked well with Debian? I hadn't even considered that as an option.

Re: Draw on a PDF Online

#17

Post by thewebcount » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 7:49 PM UTC

Does this involve uploading your potentially private PDF file? If so, do people really feel comfortable doing that?

If so, this reminds me of free internet fax services where you upload documents you want to fax to their servers, and they make a local call to fax them to their destinations. Most of what I have to fax these days is to doctors and lawyers. Why on earth would I want to upload such sensitive data to some businesses servers where they can do god knows what with it?

Re: Draw on a PDF Online

#18

Post by black_puppydog » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 8:29 PM UTC

sauwan wrote: post #16

black_puppydog wrote: post #3

Content warning: strong language I literally just spent an hour trying out different apps on a windows pc to annotate a scientific paper (standard arxiv paper) with a stylus. The results are devastating ... Every app is so broken, hidpi isn't there, font rendering is crap, touch on windows is essentially unusable, many apps didn't even let me un-fullscreen without going back to desktop mode (this is a convertible). I…

I had the exact same experience. It's intolerably bad on Windows. Can you give me an idea of what worked well with Debian? I hadn't even considered that as an option.

I've been using Zotero + xournalpp (note the "pp") and it works quite well. I wouldn't call it perfect, but I'm happy enough. It handles pinch to zoom, swipe to pan, and stylus for annotations.

Re: Draw on a PDF Online

#19

Post by black_puppydog » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 8:31 PM UTC

itronitron wrote: post #14

perrys wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Microsoft Edge have annotation tools built in?

Edge has built in tools for drawing on and highlighting a pdf file.

That might be the single reason to actually try it. Now, if only there was a way to strip out all the web browsing functionality and not have it take the attention as an invitation to nest into my system even more... :P

Re: Draw on a PDF Online

#20

Post by black_puppydog » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 8:32 PM UTC

bertman wrote: post #4

black_puppydog wrote: post #3

Content warning: strong language I literally just spent an hour trying out different apps on a windows pc to annotate a scientific paper (standard arxiv paper) with a stylus. The results are devastating ... Every app is so broken, hidpi isn't there, font rendering is crap, touch on windows is essentially unusable, many apps didn't even let me un-fullscreen without going back to desktop mode (this is a convertible). I…

>It is so much worse than on debian I feel you. What DID you end up using on Debian then?

https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp

Not perfect but so much more workable than what I saw here.

Also much more workable on linux than on windows... :|

Edit: I had written "sadly much more workable on linux than on windows" but honestly I don't think it's sad at all.