Yes, bring us pdf annotation please.
Are there any updates on this?
I created an account just to comment on this topic asking obsidian to develop pdf annotating tools. The previous community plugin “Annotator” has stopped working with version 1.5 (see many people complaining here Annotator not renderring properly · Issue #356 · elias-sundqvist/obsidian-annotator · GitHub)
Pdf annotating within the vault was one of obsidian’s strongest points, and now it is not possible anymore. Logseq has a built-in pdf annotator that works well. It would be great if the obsidian team could prioritize this. Personally I am not updating to version 1.5 until this issue is fixed
Love Obsidian, but it’s ridiculous that this isn’t implemented yet… 
It would be good to have a best-in-class solution for PDF annotation in Obsidian.
I don’t care if it relies on plugins or is a core feature.
Something that allows for annotation sync between my Kindle, direct on PDF annotations and Obsidian.
This has been on the roadmap backlog for so long. Shockingly slow movement on what is a critical feature.
Agreed, been waiting on this for so so long.
This feature would be a godsend, indeed.
That’s on the roadmap and limitation comes from the PDF.js I guess.
There are many workarounds which also includes using the Zotero. If you are heavily annotating PDF docs, mainly papers, you would probably know Zotero. Otherwise check it out.
There are couple of workflows consisting Zotero and Obsidian together. My favorite plugin for that is the Zotlit, which makes me drag & drop my annotations to Obsidian pretty seamlessly.
I currently use zotero but integration is dependent on plugins. The most popular plugin is no longer maintained. pdf.js already has direct handwriting and text annotations (though it’s rough and doesn’t have palm rejection on iPads). What’s stopping the developers from integrating that right now? Text highlighting is missing right now, but that can come later.
Zotero is somewhat archaic and more suited for academic research. For a typical learning user, a native smooth integration is required, with a single software solution. I have tried many plugins and workflows and they are not suited for my needs, as the experience is beyond disjointed.
I agree.
But Zotero is what works for me at the moment with ZotLit. All I need to do is automating the copy/paste of the highlights I do to my Obsidian notes and to be able to keep the connection to the source, so I can go back whenever I need and read more in the source. Zotlit is just a small utility to keep the connection between Zotero and Obsidian and Zotero is just a bridge for this workflow to work.
I would give it a try. I even use Zotero as read-it-later app for websites.
+1 for this.
With the Annotator plugin no longer working, this leaves a big whole in the overall Obsidian workflow. I would think that implementing some sort of pdf annotation in Obsidian (even if not feature complete) would be better than nothing at all.
I would very much like this as well. I tried to integrate Zotero in my use case, but in the end it was more hassle than what I would like. I have a solution in place to sync my obsidian-related files all in one place, with no size restrictions, and I include my digital library in it as well. It works. I’m already able to point a link exactly to a single place inside a pdf, now I only need a way to annotate it directly.
I find surprising that the value of this is not immediately obvious to everyone in the project. Every single person that uses Obsidian to study would benefit from core pdf annotations. Reading and interacting with pdfs composes at least 80% of the study time of everyone learning or doing science, mathematics and related fields.
PDF++ plugin
I’m actually quite surprised that this issues hasn’t been resolved by the Obsidian team, considering Obsidian has been out for a few years now. This is a very big hole in Obsidian, along with handwriting, and it really needs to be filled if Obsidian is going to be taken seriously as a proper note-taking app, in my opinion. Using another app for reading PDFs results in context-switching, which is definitely not good for sustained, deep work because it causes a temporary restart and thus requires a brief build-up period to get back on track. Hopefully this request will not be lost in the void, as it’s such a basic requirement for doing any type of research.
I further support the idea of a core feature of Obsidian that let us highlight and annotate pdf. Moreover, there’s already a great plugin called PDF++ that not only does that but also other cool things, but its own creator says that there’s high risk it won’t work in new Obsidian updates (see ush’s post in [Feature Request] Make Builtin PDF Annotations - Feature archive - Obsidian Forum); that thing stopped me from even trying this new plugin, since it would be frustrating to learn to use a thing that in few months/weeks could stop to work. I’d suggest Obsidian developers to take this great plugin and make it a core plugin of Obsidian: i’m sure even its creator @ush would be happy with that, considering all his effort would not get useless.
@matar3 I’d say PDF++ can be considered to be more future-proof than other PDF plugins that store annotations as JSON code blocks with their own data structure (Annotator, Markmind, …), though. (details: Plugin Fragility? · RyotaUshio/obsidian-pdf-plus · Discussion #48 · GitHub)
But yeah, I agree it would be great if Obsidian could provide the functionalities natively or at least provide a stable public API for the PDF-related features in the future.