PDF annotation mass backup/archive

[adnanreddy]

PDF pen annotations do not appear to be saved to a PDF until using "Save copy to device" and selecting "With annotations". Once this copy is saved, the annotations cannot be modified again in Episteme. I understand this is probably due to technical limitations with the PDF file format. To overcome these issues (and in general for best practices with data), my workflow would be to use "Save a copy" to create archives of the annotated PDFs with the annotations flattened, while also keeping the "live" version available to edit these annotations.

However, having to manually save a copy of each PDF makes this essentially a non-starter. Ideally, there could be an option to select a working folder and archive all PDFs with or without annotations to another folder. I'd also want this to work on subfolders of the working folder and preserve that folder structure in the archive.

For example, I might have...

/Working

/Working/document.pdf

/Working/Project 1

/Working/Project 1/another_document.pdf

/Working/Project 2

/Working/Project 2/not_annotated.pdf

My request is to have an option to select the /Working folder and copy all subfolders and their contents to a /Archive folder, with annotations saved to the PDF. So that would turn into:

/Archive

/Archive/document_annotated.pdf

/Archive/Project 1

/Archive/Project 1/another_document_annotated.pdf

/Archive/Project 2

/Archive/Project 2/not_annotated.pdf

This would make your app amazing studying, note-taking, productivity, etc. Thanks!

[Aryan-Raj3112]

I am looking into an option to actually embed these annotations in the pdf and also allow the app to edit at least its own annotations

[adnanreddy]

Thanks, that would definitely be great. Whether or not that ends up working, is it possible to add archive option by folder? That would be very helpful for productivity.

[Aryan-Raj3112]

but currently the folder you add in the app is via SAF which only gives access to that folder, I can't add another folder outside that folder without a permission like: MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE. But I guess I can give option to have an archive but that would be in your root or source folder like /Working/Archive

[adnanreddy]

/Working/Archive would be perfect. I'd really just like the folder structure to be preserved. After that, my intent was to copy/paste the archive to an external drive or cloud storage.