I am not a researcher myself, and therefore might have a slightly different requirement profile. I do have tens of thousands of PDF files, most of which contain varying amounts of comments and internal links. At the moment it is less important for me to be able to manage, sort, arrange or export comments or highlights.
However, I'm looking for a way to collaborate (internationally) between teams, particularly using (lots of) PDF files.
The use case is often such that there are dozens or hundreds of PDF files involved in a project. If I'm working on a project by myself, I would pack all the essential PDF's into one large and ever growing project PDF with up to many thousand pages, which I then would use to track the project for months and years.
Such a project PDF can end up containing tens of thousands of highlights and comments, and particularly thousands of internal hyperlinks. Especially the internal hyperlinks are invaluable, because even after years, you can track all correlations, quotations, cross-references etc. that have ever played a role in the project, in a matter of seconds. The same of course goes for the lightning-fast advanced (Boolean) search capabilities of PDF-XChange Editor within such large project files, as well as for its advanced editing and page handling/arranging capabilities (and many more of its features).
Now the question for me is whether and how something similar can be done also across teams and locations. In other words, how can other team members benefit from my thousands of highlights, comments and hyperlinks (and vice versa), and how can they also add their own additional comments, links etc. to the project?
It currently seems to me that the only way to share such huge project PDFs across teams would be via some cloud drive, so that everyone can access and work on them. However, this fails already for technical reasons, because it is not possible for several people to work on and edit one shared PDF at the same time.
Therefore, I'm still looking for ideas as to whether something similar is possible, maybe without packing all relevant documents into one giant PDF. In other words, how can you work in a (team) project with, for example, hundreds of documents in a way so that the following capabilities are provided:
- shared team access to all documents
- possibility to annotate the documents with highlights, comments, additions etc.
- possibility to link not only between documents, but also between certain pages or text passages of documents (like when hyperlinking internally in a PDF)
- full text search of all documents belonging to the project (and only these documents)
- flexible arrangement of the document view(s) on the screen like with PDF-XChange Editor, especially with multiple split screens or windows side by side
- etc....
David