Ask HN: Web app for storing and annotating PDFs

3 pointss_r_n6y ago2 comments

I am extremely frustrated by the lack of a web app that will simply store PDFs and let you annotate them. For example, a simple navigation sidebar and a display to the right would be sufficient. I have tried googling for this to no avail. Are there any recommendations for something like this? As a sidenote, I currently use Dynalist for all of my notes and if there is something similar to this that can store and annotate PDFs, that would be ideal.

2 comments

opminion6y ago

Consider converting the PDF to HTML, and then annotate the HTML, http://web.hypothes.is

Three years ago I faced this problem while creating a prototype to annotate research papers, and used a client side library by http://annotateit.org which posted annotations to my own server.

The conversion from HTML to PDF was handled by http://pdftron.com DocPub.

s_r_nOP6y ago

I've installed hypothes.is on your recommendation and tried it out. There are a bit more steps than I'd hope for, such as needing to sign into chrome and storing the hypothes.is-generated link in my notes (on Dynalist), instead of storing everything in a simple web platform. Still, this is better than anything I've come across. Thank you!

Edit: I could just use the hypothes.is platform to locate my PDF notes as well, instead of storing the URLs. One downside is the lack of organization, but the upside is that it's less work than copying/pasting the hypothes.is-generated HTML page every time. (As you can tell, I am very lazy).

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