

Until then, we're gradually discovering edge cases and improving our parsing through a lot of manual hardcoding. Of course, network effects are strong and that's not going to happen for a long time, if ever. As we've come such a long way in the past 30 years, if we had our druthers, we'd move people off PDF entirely and into something meant for the digital-first world (eg an ebook standard such as epub or mobi). Why does my PDF keep coming back with an error?Īs a bit of background, PDF is an incredibly fickle file format originally created in 1993 for the purpose of printing digital documents to analog paper. Open the PDF, find a highlight, and search for a fragment of the highlight text.

In other words, it's named something non-obvious.

If you didn't receive an error email from Readwise, you likely can't find the PDF highlights in Readwise because the file had strange metadata. I've imported PDF highlights but I can't find them on Readwise? Note: You can now edit the title and author in Readwise. If the PDF has no metadata, Readwise will use filename as book title and leave the author blank. If your preferred app does allow metadata editing, we encourage you to make it a habit to clean these up as some PDFs have strange metadata for reasons unknown to us. Readwise extracts the document title and author name from the PDF metadata. Not every PDF reader application enables editing of these properties. Yes, but the size of the attachments must be below 30 megabytes in total. If extracting highlights from PDFs is important to you, we recommend switching to one of the reader apps described above! Can I send multiple PDFs in a single email?
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Adobe Acrobat on iPad and Android tablets (we're looking into this).If you could let us know what PDF app you're using when you email PDFs, it would really help us! Which PDF reader apps do not work with Readwise?īelieve it or not, there are some PDF reading apps that do not take normal highlights per the PDF annotation spec so our parser cannot extract them. LiquidText (note: there is a LiquidText glitch where you must do all of your highlighting in a single session).Thus far, we've had positive results with the following apps (provided you are working with a clean PDF to begin with):
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Use the concatenation feature described here: How to Combine Highlights On-the-Fly with Readwise. What happens if a highlight spans two pages?ĭue to limitations of the PDF file format, the highlight will be broken into two separate highlights. The absolute worst are PDF presentations with text all over the page. You can still extract highlights from multi-column PDFs: just be prepared for things to sometime fall out of order. Text in a single column extracts much better (read: much better) than two or three column PDFs. Highlights extract much cleaner from digital PDFs than scanned PDFs with OCR applied. PDF is a fickle file format, so some PDFs highlight better than others:

You can also upload PDFs by selecting the PDF Import option from Add Highlights. To import highlights from a PDF, simply email the highlighted PDF file as an attachment to an email address associated with your Readwise account). Yes! But please note that support for PDF highlights is in perpetual beta so you may discover a new bug from time to time (which we will promptly attempt to fix).
