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Content warning: strong language I literally just spent an hour trying out different apps on a windows pc to annotate a scientific paper (standard arxiv paper)
by black_puppydog 6y ago
Content warning: strong language
I literally just spent an hour trying out different apps on a windows pc to annotate a scientific paper (standard arxiv paper) with a stylus.
The results are devastating... Every app is so broken, hidpi isn't there, font rendering is crap, touch on windows is essentially unusable, many apps didn't even let me un-fullscreen without going back to desktop mode (this is a convertible).
I surmise that the "upload your pdf and do the editing in the cloud" market only exists because the user story on windows is utter shit. It is so much worse than on debian, running on the same hardware. This includes the touch screen and stylus handling, font rendering, UI, responsiveness, essentially everything that people always claim linux is so bad at.
I'm not comparing it to apples's golden cage of course, they may have amazing pdf editing but I'm not interested.
- bertman 6y ago>It is so much worse than on debian I feel you. What DID you end up using on Debian then?
- black_puppydog 6y agohttps://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp Not perfect but so much more workable than what I saw here. Also much more workable on linux than on windows... :| Edit: I had written "sadly much more workable on linux than on windows" but honestly I don't think it's sad at all.
- senorsmile 6y agoxournal has builds available for windows. I just showed my wife how to sign a pdf her laptop last night (the only windows machine in the house).
- black_puppydog 6y agoI tried that (well, xpurnalpp, not xournal) and the stylus/touch story didn't compare to the Debian experience at all... :(
- itronitron 6y agoIf you haven't tried Microsoft Edge then it's worth a shot. Curious to know if you have used it and how it compared to other applications.
- perrys 6y agoDoes Microsoft Edge have annotation tools built in?
- itronitron 6y agoEdge has built in tools for drawing on and highlighting a pdf file.
- black_puppydog 6y agoThat might be the single reason to actually try it. Now, if only there was a way to strip out all the web browsing functionality and not have it take the attention as an invitation to nest into my system even more... :P
- twsted 6y ago> I'm not comparing it to apples's golden cage of course, they may have amazing pdf editing... Actually yes
- perrys 6y agoHey! Your absolutely right, Apple has got down an awesome native PDF editor & annotator and that Windows do not have their act together for native apps. The direction Good Annotations is taking however is to be able to do all of that collaboratively with other users. The stuff you see today is hopefully the first step. Device compatability is obviously a tough one because there are so many different devices out there creating alot of edge cases. At the moment we're following the data to get things off the ground. Chrome & Desktop. We will be looking at touch support in the near future
- BitwiseFool 6y agoHow does such a ubiquitous format have such terrible and disjointed editing tools in this day and age?
- sauwan 6y agoI had the exact same experience. It's intolerably bad on Windows. Can you give me an idea of what worked well with Debian? I hadn't even considered that as an option.
- black_puppydog 6y agoI've been using Zotero + xournalpp (note the "pp") and it works quite well. I wouldn't call it perfect, but I'm happy enough. It handles pinch to zoom, swipe to pan, and stylus for annotations.
- aegis4244 6y agoUbuntu studio worked best for my touchscreen laptops. Only distro I found that handled things well.