Editable annotations in PDF documents

Scrivener Wish List
1

First. Scrivener is great. You guys have done a fantastic job! I’m using it to write my PhD. Part of my workflow involves the application Sente - the keeper of all my references. For various reasons I like to do all annotations in Sente before I export the annotated PDFs into Scrivener to start writing. Once in Scrivener I can view the annotations that I’ve made without issue and I like being able to work with a draft document and an annotated pdf side by side. However, I can’t select the text in those visible annotated note fields, which makes copy/paste difficult (or I haven’t figured out how to do it yet). I’m assuming there is a pretty big reason for this. Having access to that text though would be helpful.

At the moment I’m switching applications which I’d rather avoid if I could.

Once I start working in Scrivener I like to stay in Scrivener as much as possible. Thanks for your time!

2

This currently isn’t feasible because the PDF display engine that is being used doesn’t have annotation editing tools in it (Scrivener isn’t a native PDF editor/reader like Adobe Reader or even Preview, it uses the OS kit that is available for viewing PDFs). It does provide highlighting, so we do have that ability enabled.

What you need to do, and this is true for all uneditable media types in the binder, is open the file in an external editor to make any changes to it. This is really easy to do. Just hit Ctrl-Cmd-O, or click the little application button in the footer bar of the PDF display to open it in the default viewer. If you right-click that button you can also use alternate software and even set up Scrivener to use that from now on, instead of the Finder default.

3

Thank you for a quick reply and informative answer.