[FR] Support for replying to annotations in PDFs

[PennHui666]

Environment Information:

• Operating System:Windows10
• Application Version:obsidian v1.5.8
• Plugin Version: v0.36.4

Problem Description:

I am used to annotating PDFs in Adobe Acrobat, and some of the annotations I make have reply messages.These replies can be displayed well in readers other than obsidian, but not in obsidian.
The problem now is obsidian can only display one reply, and the extra ones will be displayed as notes and will overlap and block the text.

Screenshot of problem

• In adobe acrobat
  

• In obsidian
  

Proposed Improvement:

1. Improve the display of responses to comments saved in PDF, and provide a copy back link function for them.
2. If possible, pdf++ should make up for the lack of functionality in replying to pdf annotations.

[RyotaUshio]

This seems to be an upstream bug of Mozilla PDF.js (the PDF rendering library Obsidian uses).
Indeed, you will experience the same issue in their Chrome extension and Firefox's PDF viewer.

It will be possible to fix this with this plugin, but it requires a bit of work.
As a temporary workaround for the text occlusion, I implemented an option to hide reply annotations. It's now available in 0.37.0-beta10. This release can be installed via BRAT only.

Screen.Recording.2024-03-01.at.22.36.53.mov

[PennHui666]

@RyotaUshio
Thank you for your reply
Your temporary solution works! ! !

I use replies in pdf annotations to record different views on the same thing or point of view.
This is useful, but there may be several replies to the same annotation, so a panel may be needed to manage them.
The following image is the solution to this problem from booknote (an unlisted plug-in), for reference only.

• Show the ownership relationship between annotations and replies
• Indicate the number of replies under the label
• even can filter, sort and search

[RyotaUshio]

Wow that's incredible!
Is it this plugin?: https://github.com/chenghongyao/obsidian-bookmaster-plugin

But here's one thing to note: it's unclear if PDF++ adds this level of reply support in annotations because it's not the use case PDF++ is made for.
PDF++ can edit text contents of annotations (if you enable PDF editing), but it's not the main thing.
PDF++'s strength is that you can add notes as normal markdown, not in the PDF file itself or as some messy JSON code blocks, which you can link to anything in your vault.

[PennHui666]

@RyotaUshio

Is it this plugin?: https://github.com/chenghongyao/obsidian-bookmaster-plugin

Yes, that's it.

But here's one thing to note: it's unclear if PDF++ adds this level of reply support in annotations because it's not the use case PDF++ is made for.

PDF++ and booknote are both based on pdf.js, so it should be OK.
I originally used Adobe Acrobat to annotate and reply, so it doesn't matter if this idea doesn't come true.
It's just that sometimes I need to see or use the reply content in the annotation, but obsidian does not support it, which is not very friendly to me.