I am experimenting with a new workflow. I am using WebDAV method to serve the wiki. Using file upload plug in, I added few pdfs into this wiki. Is it possible to annotate those pdfs using the dynannotate plug in ?
I saw an old discussion in the google groups regarding a similar approach to annotate using dynannotate. Can someone provide me help regarding this?
I can’t answer this question about dynanotate but I can say I get value annotating PDF files on disk with the Free Foxit reader, the annotations are written to the actual PDF. This is feature rich and they maintain it.
I’m afraid not, the dynannotate plugin can only work with HTML content.
Any possibility of pdf annotation in tiddlywiki as a plug in in the future?
My guess is no. As i understand it pdfs inside tiddlywiki are like a binary file and the browser uses its pdf viewer to display the pdf not tiddlywiki.
Keep in mind tiddlywiki makes full use of the browser and its helper apps so somtimes it can be more profitable to explore browser addons or helper apps because then your solution operates in tiddlywiki and beyond tiddlywiki.
Hi, because I had to search quite a while I put a link to the mentioned
I just realized it can be incredibly helpfull for usecase where you want to highlight a word in a searchbox etc.
Best wishes Jan
By the way: Has someone a tool to make annotations / annotation-tiddlers whils working / reading?
Hi @TW_Tones is this really a structural limitation, are we sure of that?
I am hoping that something akin to LogSeq’s pdf commenting feature would be at least in principle doable in TiddlyWiki. Would it be possible, and if so, what would it take (perhaps @jeremyruston you see a way)?
(for reference, LogSeq can annotate pdfs and backlink to specific parts of the pdf. Another part of the workflow is that it can not only use pdfs uploaded to its assets folder, but also those referenced by Zotero, and import all metadata. These two features together are a game-changer in academic workflows. Description post with video at the bottom).
Best wishes, Álvaro.
The current version of Dynannotate cannot annotate PDFs, but potentially there is a route to getting it working with the same pdf.js library that Zotero and LogSeq use. PDF.js from Mozilla is the library that Firefox uses to display PDFs. It works by rendering the PDF to an HTML canvas, which is not compatible with Dynannotate, but it has it’s own annotation features.
As I said I suspect the answer it no, but I expect its not a structural limitation, it is just with multiple layers of software things get less flexible.
However Earlier I pointed out Foxit Reader is VERY good at PDF annotation. And PDF’s treated as external files will display any annotations you apply, so you can effectively do as you ask even if annotations are done outside tiddlywiki, which makes sense if you want them as independent files to share/email as well.
For anyone who wants to annotate in tiddlers, I made a ready to use mod of dynannotate here:
That is encouraging, even if integrating pdf.js with Tiddlywiki looks like a sizeable project!
Thanks @TW_Tones for your answer, but in this case I really need annotations in TiddlyWiki. Having them as tiddlers that one can remix, endow with metadata and display flexibly is part of a very effective scholarly workflow combining ideas from Zettelkasten (cross-linking, high-granularity thoughts) and spaced repetition (in particular: incremental reading).
@JanJo thanks for sharing Dynannotate Mod, even if it is not applicable for pdfs it explores how the interface could look like (provided we could render the pdf in a tiddler, or some sort of pane). A nice feature, I noticed, would perhaps be to backlink annotations to the annotated tiddler?
Thanks everyone,
Álvaro.
PS. in Logseq, it seems that the logic for annotations is written in ClojureScript
This can be easily realized in a viewTemplate which uses the annotation-tiddler field.
Sure, whatever you want, but remember if an external PDF is represented and viewable in a tiddler then that tiddler can have metadata assigned to it.
Thanks Anthony. For my use case, I need to extract from the pdf multitude of bits of information (i.e. separate definitions, figures, etc out into different tiddlers). Each of these need their own metadata, so I am afraid whole-file-level metadata wouldn’t suffice.
My colleague shows me the pdf annotation feature in obsidian (GitHub - elias-sundqvist/obsidian-annotator: A plugin for reading and annotating PDFs and EPUBs in obsidian.). It is really cool to summary all annotations in a markdown file and link back to pdf file.
If this possible in Obsidian, then it should be possible in TiddlyWiki! (my Wish)
A potential route for enablingPDFs to be annotated by the Dynannotate plugin is to use Mozilla’s PDF.js to convert the PDF to simple HTML:
https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/
It would be a fun and I think relatively straightforward project to integrate the PDF.js library with TiddlyWiki, and then it should work immediately with Dynannotate.
