Copied annotations get squished on the side on smaller PDFs

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Zarquan314
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Copied annotations get squished on the side on smaller PDFs

Post by Zarquan314 »

I use PDF-XChange Editor to grade student papers. I like that I can hand write comments, as it can be hard to convey math in written text. One of my favorite features of grading digital papers is my ability to copy comments from one paper to another, assuring consistency in feedback across papers with similar errors.

Unfortunately, not all of the students submit PDFs of the same page size. For the most part, this is OK, but it causes a few problems. One of which being that when I copy a comment from a larger page to a smaller page, it pastes on the literal position from the other paper. If that position is off the page, it will move it horizontally or vertically to put it on the page. This happens on a per penstroke basis, leading to all the characters that would have been off the page overlapping. I have to either rewrite the comment or move the comment on the paper I copied it from so that the whole thing will be on one page.

I see this all as unnecessary. Is there a way to make the paste function treat it all as one object? Or have it paste at the top corner? Or have it not move pasted objects on to the page?

A second problem is that sometimes the students submit PDFs with extremely small pages and the comment doesn't fit and needs to be resized on the source document because the comment is bigger than the page.
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Re: Copied annotations get squished on the side on smaller PDFs

Post by Paul - Tracker Supp »

Hi Zarquan,

Forgive me, I have to ask if your forum name is a Douglas Adams reference...

Regards the pasting, can you check the version you are running? I tried to reproduce your case but the pencil tool annotations I was copy/pasting worked as you expact, not as you report. Every time I pasted the content it was a group and did all display on the edge without need to rearrange anything.

I made some Pencil Tool annotations in the top left and bottom right on an A3 page. I copied these then pasted into an A4, and then an A5 page, in each case the pasted annotations fit nicely on the page.

The current build is 9.2.359.0. May I ask you to indulge me and try Help then Check for Updates then try and reproduce the problem?

If you can, may I see an example, source and result documents so we can reproduce here would be great if possible.
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Paul O'Rorke
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David.P
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Re: Copied annotations get squished on the side on smaller PDFs

Post by David.P »

Hello all,

As a workaround, I would recommend to simply normalize all pages of any such document to a desired target size before starting to comment, using the Resize Pages function, thereby making sure to enable the option to resize the content.

image.png
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Zarquan314
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Re: Copied annotations get squished on the side on smaller PDFs

Post by Zarquan314 »

Yes, it is based off Zarquon. I heard the name and thought it was spelled Zarquan.

The issue is still present in the latest version. I may be wrong about some of the symptoms though. One student turned in a paper that was 2384x3370 pixels. Another turned in a paper that was 612x792. I wrote a comment in the bottom corner of the paper with larger dimensions and copied it to the paper with the smaller dimensions. I was sure to zoom in so that it wouldn't be too big in the receiving paper (though that is another issue). When I use the Select Comments tool and copy the hand written comment, it squished it on the smaller paper. However, it only squished it to the side rather than to the bottom corner.
image.png
image1.png
Note I used the registry change to make each penstroke its own object so I could more easily undo bad pen strokes. This is a rather extreme example, as I would resize that paper because of the extremely thin annotations, but this happens if I write near the margins of papers that are both reasonably sized.

Resizing the paper would solve the problem, but that is annoying to do to every paper. I would rather the comment not be distorted and resize the comment to fit the page.
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: Copied annotations get squished on the side on smaller PDFs

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello, Zarquan314

Thank you for explaning a bit more here. The page size is most certainly the cause of the issue here, and this is something that the Dev team is working on.
At the moment, what you see is the intended handling, so the only way to get what you want would be to enable the option to "paste into mouse position" from the commenting preferences (Ctrl_K), and then right-click > paste the content onto the page.

As I mentioned, we are looking into changing this, in the future, we will try to reposition all pasted content with relative position retained. This means that in your example, the text should be appear at the same size and with the same spacing in the new document. I cannot say when this will happen just yet, but know it is on the way.

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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David.P
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Re: Copied annotations get squished on the side on smaller PDFs

Post by David.P »

Zarquan314 wrote: Fri Nov 26, 2021 8:40 pmResizing the paper would solve the problem, but that is annoying to do to every paper. I would rather the comment not be distorted and resize the comment to fit the page.
Normalizing the page size of an entire document, once set up, takes exactly two mouse clicks and about 1 second of computing time.

On the other hand, moving and resizing each comment to all sorts of different document sizes can easily take hours...
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Re: Copied annotations get squished on the side on smaller PDFs

Post by Paul - Tracker Supp »

We will do what we can to improve this for the next build.

I am desperately trying to come up with a witty Great Prophet comment Peter but I'm failing miserably, had a terrible time, all sort of things cropping up at the last moment....
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rakunavi
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Re: Copied annotations get squished on the side on smaller PDFs

Post by rakunavi »

Hello all,

Off topic, but I am very interested in the following comment by Zarquan314.
Zarquan314 wrote: Fri Nov 26, 2021 8:40 pm Note I used the registry change to make each penstroke its own object so I could more easily undo bad pen strokes.
Does anyone know of this registry setting?

I have previously requested the same functionality in the following topic, along with a lasso select tool, etc., and it was rejected very easily, but it would be great if it were possible to recognize each pen stroke independently of each other, just by changing the registry.

As FelixPDF requested at the beginning of the following topic, this is one of the things many users would like to see improved when using the pencil tool in the PDF-XChange Editor.

Best regards,
rakunavi
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forum.pdf-xchange.com/viewtopic.php?t=39665 LassoTool
forum.pdf-xchange.com/viewtopic.php?t=38554 CmtGarbled
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Re: Copied annotations get squished on the side on smaller PDFs

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Hello rakunavi,

The Lasso tool is still too complex and indeed is for now rejected as a feature.
As for the pencil strokes separation - it is likely this registry change that Zarquan314 refers to:
viewtopic.php?f=62&t=35838&p=148810&hil ... ay#p148833

Kind regards,
Stefan
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rakunavi
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Re: Copied annotations get squished on the side on smaller PDFs

Post by rakunavi »

Hi Stefan,
Tracker Supp-Stefan wrote: Mon Mar 20, 2023 12:55 pm As for the pencil strokes separation - it is likely this registry change that Zarquan314 refers to:
viewtopic.php?f=62&t=35838&p=148810&hil ... ay#p148833
Thank you for your great advice!

One of the shortcomings of PDF-XChange Editor that I have always felt has completely disappeared. The JavaScript method of changing settings as described in the linked topic is also great. However, if it's possible, it would be better to have the settings in places where users would notice them a little more, such as in the Pencil tool Properties.

I am probably an above-average user of PDF-XChange Editor, but it took me a year and a half to learn about this setting. I shudder to think what would have happened if I had not asked this question.

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rakunavi
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forum.pdf-xchange.com/viewtopic.php?t=39665 LassoTool
forum.pdf-xchange.com/viewtopic.php?t=38554 CmtGarbled
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: Copied annotations get squished on the side on smaller PDFs

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello, rakunavi

There are dozens, if not hundreds of small configurable items that can be manipulated by JS, enough so that we don't actually have a full list of them on hand here, when we need them, sometimes the dev team needs to dig back into the code to find one for us... Many of them are also functions that should not be "fiddled with" by those who are unaware of the consequences which come with those changes, much like editing the windows registry manually.

For these two reasons, it is not likely that we will ever be making all of these options into useable buttons/toggles/options through the UI, though some of them do eventually see implementation. I will pass along the suggestion for this one, but I cannot make any promises at this time.

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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rakunavi
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Re: Copied annotations get squished on the side on smaller PDFs

Post by rakunavi »

Hi Daniel, thank you for your comment.

Of course, I am not saying that anything that can be set in the registry should be brought into the user interface. If the default setting was to separate each stroke, it would be the same as OneNote and all other Pen-friendly apps, so there would be no need to change the setting easily.

The development team might have chosen the current settings for some merit, but if they are going to continue to set unusual settings as the default, it would be better to at least make it easy to figure out how to make the general settings. It would be a useless treasure if you could only find this information by searching forum archives. I hope PDF-XChange Editor will evolve as a Pen-friendly app.

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rakunavi
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Re: Copied annotations get squished on the side on smaller PDFs

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

Hello rakunavi,

As the saying goes "dot the i's and cross the t's" - I believe in a previous conversation we've had with the dev team they explained to us that the grouping is actually useful both for the person making the inputs (especially of such multi stroke letters) and for later management of the objects in the PDF file and that's why this is the default behaviour we offer.
Dan's comments were more general and not specific to this feature. There are just too many things that can be configured if needed though the default should only be configurable by advanced users or on our side. Hence his comment that not all of those would be exposed for direct manipulation by all users.
We do appreciate your feedback for the pen input feature specifically and it will certainly be taken into consideration for future improvements!

Kind regards,
Stefan
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rakunavi
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Re: Copied annotations get squished on the side on smaller PDFs

Post by rakunavi »

Hi Stefan, thank you for your comment.
Tracker Supp-Stefan wrote: Tue Mar 21, 2023 2:05 pm I believe in a previous conversation we've had with the dev team they explained to us that the grouping is actually useful both for the person making the inputs (especially of such multi stroke letters) and for later management of the objects in the PDF file and that's why this is the default behaviour we offer.
It is interesting that developers and users have opposite impressions on the same matter. I personally think that automatic grouping by elapsed time may be suitable for figures and simple signatures, but not for sentences longer than a certain length.

I can say this with confidence because I am writing new sentences every day using kanji, a character with a large number of strokes, and at the same time I am editing and managing a large number of handwritten sentences on a daily basis. Much more time is spent writing by hand in a day than typing on a keyboard. If a developer coded a program by handwriting, I would take my hat off to them.

It might be different if OCR technology could automatically group each character, but with the current technology, I feel that the developer's well-meaning implementation of automatic grouping is backfiring.

Incidentally, handwritten characters that have been auto-grouped by default in PDF-XChange Editor can be ungrouped using JavaScript, which can be downloaded from the following page. It is for Acrobat, but works perfectly with PDF-XChange Editor.

  • Acrobat/Reader -- Ungroup Pencil Comments (FREE)
    http://try67.blogspot.com/2017/03/acrobatreader-ungroup-pencil-comments.html
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rakunavi
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Re: Copied annotations get squished on the side on smaller PDFs

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello, rakunavi

You will be happy to hear that, at least in respect to pencil tool comment grouping, The Dev team has agreed to add a toggle for this into the UI. At the moment I cannot provide a timeline, or say how exactly this will be presented, either a checkbox in the preferences, or a dropdown in one or both of the format tab/properties pane, but there will in the future be some control of this option.

Back to the earlier topic, Stefan is correct that my statement was a more generalized item encompassing all possible functions that can be exclusively controlled by JS or Registry edits currently. It was not to say that this specific function would not, only that currently we have no plans to off "All" of those options in the UI at any point in the future. Some of them, possibly even enough to say "many" of them could see implementation in the future, just not "all" of them.

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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Re: Copied annotations get squished on the side on smaller PDFs

Post by rakunavi »

Hi Daniel,

thank you very much. I look forward to seeing how it will be implemented in the future. Please give my best regards to the developers.

Best regards,
rakunavi
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Copied annotations get squished on the side on smaller PDFs

Post by Tracker Supp-Stefan »

:)
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