Not sure what is different, or if it's Adobe, but something weird is happening... #223
-
Hello! I have been using PDF++ for a month or so now and I've been particularly concerned with exporting annotations from Obsidian over to Airtable where I use a data warehouse infrastructure. A big part of this is using the global copy highlights function. @RyotaUshio has been incredibly helpful in getting this to work by making it possible to pull both the highlighted text as a quote but also the annotations added to it. Sadly, I've run into several odd PDFs, and I cannot tell what's different about them that breaks the system and prevents me from pulling the information I need. For some reason the copy/paste does not return any results at all. the underlines there are supposed to be the highlighted text. When highlighting the text in the initial reading phase, I can see the OCR worked and there IS TEXT to be highlighted. When I use a simple raw copy/paste function on text it works just fine. But when you use the annotation copier to get the backlink, quote, and comment, the quote is not present at all. I've also asked Obsidian to open the file in standard Adobe Acrobat and I discovered that the highlight pulled into the annotation system with dummy text only of, "highlighted text." From here if you leave an annotation note it is kind of random whether it actually pulls or not - I can't tell the difference between the reports that work and the ones that do not. First my setup:My callout template: I have rebuilt this from simplest back up to its current state
I have 2 files included. Both have been uploaded to this system.
Expected performance based on the 2020 document (works):
What the system returns for the 2020 document (as expected).
What I have tried on the 2023 report that does not workConfirm that the PDF has an OCR index and is searchable with recognizable text: It's clear that the text is highlighted and functional for extraction. Raw copy works:
Copy comment returns: >
In this result, you can see that the comment was pulled but the highlighted text was not. The underscore in its place is actually the markdown for italicizing it and when the quote is not pulled, it shows empty. This only happens on some PDFs and I can't figure out what the difference is between the various files. To better understand, I've pulled the PDF into Adobe Acrobat, Nitro Pro, Scribus, and Libra Draw - removing Obsidian from the equation. All of them, when observing the highlight actually look like this instead of pulling the actual text as intended: In this Screenshot, you'll see that the text is available in the OCR but the highlight is coming across very weird - as bounding boxes rather than anything else. The text is not highlighted individually but as a group. In the comments listing on the right, instead of the text represented it simply says "highlighted text" This suggests to me that the PDF itself is not rendering the highlights correctly so it must not be the obsidian engine, but the other reports from other years do just fine. The issue is that both documents clearly show in their priorities the same permissions: Other steps I've tried
TBH I have spent WAY TOO MUCH time trying to figure this out but I really need the data. I resorted to copy/pasting things manually so that I'm not slowing down my project but if someone can figure out why this is not pulling correctly, what is different and how to prepare PDFs for use in Obsidian PDF++ I would GREATLY appreciate it :) That said, thanks for listening! |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
Replies: 1 comment 3 replies
-
In short, this difference comes from the fact that these two PDFs have their text written in different ways (maybe because of the OCR software used for the 2023 file?). Screen.Recording.2024-06-12.at.20.56.38.movSo this is basically Obsidian's problem, and PDF++ just inherits it. You might want to send them a feature request (or bug report, though I'm not sure if they would think of this as a bug) via the official forum. That being said, it might be possible to fix this behavior on my end. I've created a new issue for that: #224 |
Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
In short, this difference comes from the fact that these two PDFs have their text written in different ways (maybe because of the OCR software used for the 2023 file?).
And importantly, you will find this problem persist when you disable PDF++ and use Obsidian's native feature for copying annotations:
Screen.Recording.2024-06-12.at.20.56.38.mov
So this is basically Obsidian's problem, and PDF++ just inherits it. You might want to send them a feature request (or bug report, though I'm not sure if they would think of this as a bug) via the official forum.
That being said, it might be possible to fix this behavior on my end. I've created a new issue for that: #224
There's no ETA, bu…