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PoeticMediaLab / Lacuna

Lacuna: Digital Annotation for Teaching and Learning
http://www.lacunastories.com
GNU General Public License v2.0
36 stars 20 forks source link

Sentence selection for annotation in PDF viewer #230

Closed NTNUbeta closed 5 years ago

NTNUbeta commented 5 years ago

It's impossible to select text in the PDF viewer, but rather it selects an area. For instance, one cannot select a sentence that runs from one line to another. This makes the PDF feature pretty worthless for us, since annotations aren't tied to the text.

dabush commented 5 years ago

Why did you post this as an issue? This is the way this feature is designed, for reasons that have to do with the way pdfs are displayed in a browser. Not all pdfs have text encoded, so there's no text that can be "tied" to the annotation. That leaves area selection as a good way to handle all pdfs.

NTNUbeta commented 5 years ago

It was a major dissapointment for our course instructors when they realized that uploading materials in PDF format would not give them the same functionality as manually putting in the materials. It might not be an issue, but it should definitely be part of the documentation, as one still needs to plan for the amount of time it will take to copy/paste in the article manually, if one wants the full annotation functionality. We wrongly assumed this would solve that.

mwidner commented 5 years ago

We should definitely document this difference. Thanks for the suggestion. Just for some background, the PDF feature is designed as a tradeoff. It's much easier to upload a lot of texts, but without the work to convert everything to text, the annotations can't be as detailed. It's a limitation of PDFs, unfortunately.

On Fri, Aug 17, 2018, 2:40 AM NTNUbeta notifications@github.com wrote:

It was a major dissapointment for our course instructors when they realized that uploading materials in PDF format would not give them the same functionality as manually putting in the materials. It might not be an issue, but it should definitely be part of the documentation, as one still needs to plan for the amount of time it will take to copy/paste in the article manually, if one wants the full annotation functionality. We wrongly assumed this would solve that.

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mwidner commented 5 years ago

One last point: PDFs are especially useful for users who want to annotation images, material with data visualizations, and other such non-text or mixed media materials.