[FR] A drawback is the flickering at the moment Obsidian reloads the modified PDF

[jkjoker]

Describe your request

“A drawback is the flickering at the moment Obsidian reloads the modified PDF”

When reading, I tend to make a lot of notes, which means the screen will load multiple times and flicker frequently. When reading PDFs in the Edge browser, making notes doesn't cause flickering, and I wonder if perhaps PDF++ could achieve the same effect? Or, is there a way to achieve this indirectly? Regarding this, I have an idea (purely an idea, not necessarily technically feasible).

My idea is: Use a temporary file to save the markings made while reading, which appears to have been successfully marked, but in fact, has not yet been saved to the original PDF, thus avoiding reloading the PDF and flickering. Then, once the user closes the PDF file, or if the PDF is opened with an external tool midway through - for example, opening the PDF with the Edge browser midway, the plugin automatically performs the save in the background, ensuring that the markings from the temporary file are saved to the PDF.

Thank you!

[tprotopopescu]

Perhaps another option would be to have the option to save backlinks to file; that is highlights which are only backlinked could be saved in bulk to the pdf. I do a lot of my pdf reading on mobile and on my devices writing to pdf is very slow, it takes several seconds for each highlight to get saved, whereas just backlinking is very quick. I would prefer to save the highlights to the pdf directly; with the ability to write backlinks to the pdf it would be possible to read on mobile without interruption and then write them to the file when it is convenient.

BTW, I think this is the plugin of the year! Thanks for building this.

[RyotaUshio]

@jkjoker PDF.js has a mechanism called AnnotationEditorLayer that basically serves for this purpose but it is disabled in Obsidian, and hence this problem. I believe this problem will be resolved automatically when the Obsidian core supports native PDF annotation.

@tprotopopescu Thanks! Exporting highlighted backlinks to the PDF file is in fact in the plan.

[RyotaUshio]

You might want to try this new plugin: https://github.com/Quorafind/Obsidian-PDF-Annotator

My note here: https://github.com/RyotaUshio/obsidian-pdf-plus/blob/main/README.md#note-on-saving-annotations-directly-in-pdf