Notability is very nice, at least before the subscription pricing. They even put iCloud sync behind the subscription, that's not using their servers or datacent

Notability is very nice, at least before the subscription pricing. They even put iCloud sync behind the subscription, that's not using their servers or datacenters. Freeform covers a lot of my use-cases for Notability, but last I tried it wasn't as good for some things. A specific use I had was with importing PDFs (like, say, a textbook chapter) and marking up the chapter, tossing blank pages after exercise sections and writing out my solutions/answers or directly marking the pages. IIRC, Freeform would let you import a document like a PDF but not display it (or specific pages from it) within the Freeform document itself, instead it was a linked file. I'll have to try again but haven't had much need for this recently. EDIT: At least on iPhone, it's the same behavior. It's attached so I can open the PDF but not embedded in a way where I can directly mark it up within the larger Freeform document. I have to open the attached file to mark it up and can't just display (and then markup) selected pages.