On Aug 11, 2010, at 5:04, Carl Lee wrote:

> Christiaan,
> 
> I went with the alternative method of exporting as embedded PDF and it works 
> for the most part so I am grateful.  
> 
> A few observations to consider for the developer in charge of "Convert 
> Notes..." in future releases of Skim:
> - highlights are converted perfectly
> - position/size of text stickies are perfect, but the default note color is 
> black (probably the only flaw that makes this solution impractical for 
> appending PDFs over time) :(
> - anchored notes are shifted somewhat from their original position (probably 
> due to the embedding process, causing the anchors to be larger when viewed in 
> Preview), but icon choice (ie. question mark, filled document) is 
> preserved---this may cause anchors to drift too far to be useful as I 
> continue to append more and more PDFs over time
> - lastly, boxes and circles have the correct color, but they often show up as 
> dotted-lines (i.e. right-click>Note Line...>Dash Pattern: 3 2, but the 
> original Dash Pattern is blank)
> 
> For those of you who want to know how I did this:
> - Using "Combine PDFs" still throws away the annotations, so you have to open 
> each source PDF in Preview, then merge with a specific kind of drag and drop 
> (see TLJ's suggestion in http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=780455) 
> and then save.
> - File>Convert Notes...
> 
> The first suggestion you had definitely sounds more advanced and will 
> probably exactly yield the desired results if there is a way to directly 
> modify the annotation page numbers---maybe I'll give it a go some time later.
> 
> Thanks again,
> 
> -Bill
> 
> From: Christiaan Hofman <[email protected]>
> To: For general discussion about using Skim 
> <[email protected]>
> Sent: Tue, August 10, 2010 1:47:52 PM
> Subject: Re: [Skim-app-users] Preserve annotations after merging two 
> annotated PDFs?
> 
> 
> On Aug 10, 2010, at 20:08, Carl Lee wrote:
> 
>> Hi Christiaan,
>> 
>> I tried this and both annotations appear, but both source 1 and 2's 
>> annotations 'collide' on the same pages in the merged PDF since the 
>> annotations retain the same page numbers they had when they were created in 
>> source (i.e. let's say that source 2 has highlighted text on its page 1---on 
>> the merged PDF, the highlights for this text appear on its page 1 but the 
>> text isn't in the highlights since it appears after the last page of source 
>> 1 on the merged PDF).
>> 
>> So I think that the solution is this: can I directly modify the Skim Note 
>> files to change the page numbers for each annotation to my liking?  When I 
>> open it in a text editor, I mostly see gibberish but there are certain 
>> intelligible characters such text from my annotation and what appear to be 
>> pixel coordinates---I couldn't find page numbers though...
>> 
>> Thanks again,
>> 
>> -Bill
>> 
> 
> Ah, I didn't realize that, but you're right, the page numbers for the second 
> part won't get shifted. And no, you can't easily edit the file, it's some 
> binary archive. I guess you'd need to write a Cocoa program to do that (you 
> can convert it to XML using plutil, but good luck finding the actual page 
> numbers in there).
> 
> Perhaps an alternative is to export the PDFs with embedded notes, merge 
> those, and then run File > Convert Notes… on the combined PDF. You may lose a 
> bit of data when you have anchored notes, but most will come through OK.
> 
> Christiaan
> 
>> From: Christiaan Hofman <[email protected]>
>> To: For general discussion about using Skim 
>> <[email protected]>
>> Sent: Tue, August 10, 2010 2:13:34 AM
>> Subject: Re: [Skim-app-users] Preserve annotations after merging two 
>> annotated PDFs?
>> 
>> Before merging, export the skim notes for the two files to separate files 
>> (File > Export…). After merging, read them in (File > Read Notes…), make 
>> sure you uncheck "Replace existing notes" the second time).
>> 
>> Christiaan
>> 
>> On Aug 10, 2010, at 9:04, Carl Lee wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi everyone (developers too?),
>>> 
>>> I have two Skim-annotated PDFs (sources 1 and 2) which I want to merge into 
>>> one PDF in that order (I use CombinePDFs to do the merging since Skim 
>>> cannot do this for me).  Problem is, when I do this, the annotations for 
>>> both source PDFs are gone in the merged PDF.
>>> 
>>> Q: Is there a way to *keep* the annotations after merging?
>>> 
>>> If there is no elegant solution, here's a kludge that I hope to carry to 
>>> completion:
>>> I have made some progress in that I *can* extract my annotations when I 
>>> export as "Skim Notes" and save them onto the merged PDF by using "File > 
>>> Read Notes...", but the page numbers for my annotations in the merged PDF 
>>> are the same as they were in source---so that source 2 annotations are not 
>>> in the correct location in the merged PDF.  What I want to do is "shift" 
>>> ALL the page numbers of source 2's annotations by an integer of my choosing 
>>> (i.e. so that they correctly correspond to the "new" page numbers where 
>>> source 2 resides in the merged PDF) 
>>> 
>>> Please let me know if you have any ideas to make this work---this would be 
>>> great as I often find myself OCR scanning books one chapter at a time just 
>>> so I can annotate them in Skim!
>>> 
>>> Thanks!
>>> 
>>> -Bill

Try this: http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/SkimCombine.zip

Christiaan

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