Handwriting Editing App
Cilinia Looker
I work a lot on my iPad handwriting app (I use Goodnotes5) and paperpile handwriting app is not rich enough for me yet. I want to understand if cross editing is possible i.e. annotate pdfs in Goodnotes and have the pdf uploaded automatically.
+1 for a solution that makes it easier to use other apps to interact with the PDFs in Paperpile. I agree with the linked post, the issue with trying to implement all of these features is that no matter how much Paperpile works on things like handwriting with a stylus, dedicated writing apps like Goodnotes are probably always going to do it better (this is not a criticism, these apps are putting all of their resources into giving the best writing experience possible, while this is only a small subset of the many [great] features that Paperpile offers.)
I absolutely agree with @gavinbrooks. Starting out with my PhD I want to keep my handwritten notes & summaries as close as possible to the source PDF and this seems to be a perfect way to do it. Particularly adding blank pages in the PDF could be very helpful to write more comprehensive summaries - as would be possible with Goodnotes. However, if i may cherry-pick, i than would rather use your text marker, that easily spans multiple lines, rather than Goodnotes text marker, which is more of a freehand single line tool.
I use Evernote extensively on my Mac, iPad Pro, and iPhone. We use shared notebooks in my office and I have a ScanSnap Evernote Edition sitting on my desk. (I even have Evernote desk accessories sitting next to the scanner.) I'm pretty well immersed in the world of Evernote.
However, I've found myself turning to other tools, most recently OneNote, with greater frequency. The main issue, and it is a big one for me, is the fragmented and inferior support for note taking and PDF editing in Evernote. I use my iPad Pro with Apple Pencil extensively. There are some great Pencil-compatible apps for iOS, including Notability, PDF Expert, and OneNote.
PDFs can by opened using the "Annotate" tool in Evernote, which I think is built around the remnants of Skitch. It's fine for adding arrows and icons, but terrible (unusable) for handwritten notes on PDFs. It really can't be used for anything more than simple highlighting -- certainly not detailed annotation or note taking.
Drawings and notes can be added to an Evernote Note directly through the handwriting tool, but this simply inserts an image into the note. There's no way to use this tool to take notes over multiple pages, or to use it for annotation as far as I can tell. I've also found it to the buggy, with full pages of notes lost if you switch away from Evernote to another app before saving the image and returning to the normal notes view. I will say that that, though the tool is very limited, with very few options, the Pencil support works well and writing is fluid. This tool seems to have the most potential for future development.
Finally, there is Penultimate -- a separate app I want to love but is just too buggy, too limited, and too walled off from the rest of Evernote to be truly useful. Again, no support for importing PDFs/annotation, yet another approach to handwriting, and, though the Penultimate notes live in Evernote, nothing can be done with them in the main app.
Why, at this stage, would Evernote have three separate, incompatible and incongruous approaches to annotation/note taking, none of which begin to match the functionality of some of the other apps named?
Attached PDFs can certainly be opened in other apps, such as PDF Expert, but there is no way to get the annotated PDFs back into an Evernote note without deleting the original attachment and reattaching the PDF. That's cumbersome, and annotation seems like pretty basic functionality that Evernote should offer.
Evernote certainly has some broader advantages over OneNote, but really needs to explore something like the "canvas" style approach used by OneNote. The ability to "print" PDFs to a OneNote page and then markup the document itself and take notes/add text/etc. all on one page is invaluable. I've pretty much switched all note taking/PDF annotation to OneNote, with Evernote still used for project management and other organizational needs, which leaves me with my own fragmentation.
This is definitely a let down for me. I do a lot of sketching of designs and math notes through Notability. Its writing interface is the best I have found. Since the recent updates I have found the writing function of Evernote to be better but most of my notes/design take up multiple pages, which evernote doesn't allow you to do. Yes you can insert multiple writing pictures but it would be great to have one seamless note pad for my notes.
Also being able to change my paper background. Basically I would like Evernote to grab Notability and insert it into Evernote. I know I may be asking a bit much but I figure if I aim high, maybe the compromise will be good enough :-)
I'm using Evernote and Onenote on both my Surface and my Galaxy Note. What I can say about both is that Onenote is wonderful when it comes to annotating any kind of document, while it literally sucks at anything else and especially at syncing to/from the cloud, since it does it through Onedrive which is an incredible bottleneck. Evernote on the contrary is light-years away with its smooth and blazing fast sync mode and its overall much more solid storage, search and retrieval routines. In my humble opinion EN should really do all that it can to get the most out of this situation since, there are lots of users which, like me, really want to love EN but are drawn towards ON given its indubitably superior annotation capabilities. If EN wants to keep being the de facto leader of the note taking software segment, it must integrate its rivals core functionality and improve them instead of lagging behind with some half-baked solution.
This is a huge issue for me as well. The handwriting experience in Evernote is awful with the iPad Pro and pencil. Evernote hasn't been designed with annotation in mind. The fragmentation of their product line makes things very messy as well. The complaints regarding annotation have been here on the forum for months and I've complained to support myself to only be told that "it is being worked" but they were unable to give any sort of estimates. I will say that Evernote has at least acknowledged the issue but at this point there should be some real improvements.
Completely agree with this entire thread. I would GLADLY upgrade to Premium if this one feature were improved. I use an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil and have to do the same workaround to Notability many mention above. Would really like to be able to keep PDFs in one place, mark them up and store them in the file structure I already have in place inside Evernote.
+1 for this entire thread - Notability does a brilliant job at PDF annotations and general hand written notes in meetings - as a very long term Evernote users I am really disappointed that this thread has not got more support from Evernote - iPad Pro 9.7" + Notability is exceptional for meetings and note taking - but Evernote is just so much better as a general note storage and management tool - would love to be able to return all note taking to Evernote.
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