What's the status of native PDF annotations? (Doesn't PDF.js already support this?)
TL;DR: Obsidian uses PDF.js, which has supported native annotations since 2022. Why hasn't this made it into Obsidian yet? I'm holding out for a native solution because third-party academic workflows keep breaking on me.
The Obsidian roadmap shows that the native PDF annotation feature has been waiting in the wings for quite some time now.
As far as I understand, Obsidian uses Mozilla’s PDF.js as its native viewer. It makes total sense for the Obsidian team to rely on this open-source component and wait for upstream features rather than building their own from scratch.
But hasn't this been supported by PDF.js for a long time by now? When I open a PDF in Firefox, I can annotate and draw on it easy peasy. I took a look at their GitHub releases, and it seems the feature was introduced back in v3.0.279 (2022). The current PDF.js release is v6.2.108, and the changelogs mention multiple improvements to the annotation feature since then. Am I missing something regarding how this integrates with Electron/Obsidian?
Why I'm asking: the usual plugin fatigue.
To be transparent, I do academic writing in Obsidian, and the state of citation/PDF workflows has left me frustrated. Whenever I look for a workflow (like Zotero-to-Obsidian or plugins like PDF++), the tools are either abandoned, running on fumes, or maintained by a single developer who will likely (and understandably) move on in a few years.
I caved yesterday and challenged myself to try ZotLit, despite my hesitation to rely on community plugins for a long-term academic vault. It looks like an awesome project, but it turns out I recently updated to Zotero 10, and ZotLit isn't compatible with it yet. In the dev's defense, they are already on it, have a fix in the beta pipeline, and communicate super well on Discord.
Bad luck or not: the second I try to adopt a heavy community-plugin workflow, I'm blocked by incompatibilities between the moving parts.
So I am still holding out for native PDF annotation to keep my vault headache-free for the next decade.
Does anyone have insight into what's holding up the PDF.js integration?