PDF and EPUB annotating & note taking

Feature Requests
1

Hey! I see great niche for tools that make simple data collecting & annotating books & note taking, that turns those things into a easy to use, great looking UX/UI workflow. I need such a tool, with browser clipper, and easy book annotating, notetaking and referencing to annotation context. Your app does UX/UI very well and It’s close to what I need, but I lack features of book and pdf annotation. Please add it and help us build easy to use PKM workflows :slight_smile:

1 Like
2

Hi Bart, welcome to the Supernotes Community! :tada:

PDF annotation was one of our goals with the original MVP when we started building Supernotes back in 2018; so you could create notecards alongside your PDF. Although we quickly realised building a really good PDF annotator on the web is as challenging as building a really good note-taking experience – so we ended up only focusing on note-taking and knowledge management.

We’d still like to add this, but feel like integrating with other tools that specialise in PDF (or EPUB) annotation is the best path forward for us at the moment. Although after we release mobile apps onto the App Stores, we will be focusing on releasing our web clipper – which we think you will really like!

3

Thanks for your response, I think that integrating with expisting tools is good enough, I only want to be albe to go back to context of annotated text from the note and annotation I’ve taken easily and that’s it. I’ve found out that Calibre reader has very nice markdown export options and fits my workflow well

4

Another vote for Calibre integration +1 :slightly_smiling_face:

5

I think the biggest thing missing from the app is ability work closely with pdfs by highlighting excerpts and linking them to cards. This is the only feature keeping me tied to Logseq, and the reason I can’t move everything.

6

Hi @Appsecmaster, thanks for your feature request!

This is something we’ve been considering and has been mentioned a couple times before – there’s two main threads, one about PDF upload support and one about PDF annotation / editing, which I will append this thread to as well. Our current position on this remains the same (please read below), we want to support PDF highlighting and linking cards to certain bodies of text etc. but our current focus at the moment is still to build out our note-taking experience.

2 Likes
7

I find myself lurking on supernotes product updates all the time to see if this is something that is finally being tackled :frowning: Is there any update on this or desired to bump up the priority, given the progress on the rest of functionality?

1 Like
8

Hi @Appsecmaster,

We appreciate that you’re excited for us to implement a PDF viewer / annotation tool. As mentioned above we are still focusing on creating a even better note-taking and knowledge management tool before we start to branch out and explore other areas.

I kinda like how @jamest phrased this previously, Supernotes “is a sharp tool rather than a swiss army knife”. We are still focusing on building an even better note-taking and knowledge management tool before we start to branch out and explore other areas, of which there are many; such as PDFs, Databases, Spaced Repitition etc. And ultimately, the best path forward might be to integrate with other tools that specialise in this.

This is very much at the front of our minds, and we look forward to releasing Supernotes 3 which will bring a host of new improvements – after which we will focus on the development of our web extension which we hope you like!