Today we’ll be looking at someone else’s workflow. We’ve had these sitting around for months, some even years now. I apologise to everyone who wrote in, we didn’t forget your enquiries, we just don’t have a team big enough to handle them as we had initially thought. But, we are hoping to steadily clear the backlog, before opening up for more workflow challenges. The goal is to replicate the problem in the form, and then solve it.
The Problem
Here is the workflow challenge for today: Lewis is a university student who was using Goodnotes, but for several reasons has left the app to use OneNote, which is better. Lewis annotates lecture PDFs. I don’t have a lecture PDF, on my iPad, so I have to make one. Unfortunately, the one I had was not working, so I had to make one I could use to replicate this workflow. Most lectures come as slides, so, ideally that is the format I need. Once I got a functional copy, I opened it in Keynote, which I prefer to Microsoft PowerPoint. But this stage you can do in either app. I will create a PDF that I can annotate to add more notes. I am happy with that. So I will now save it to Files ready to import into OneNote. So, Lewis imports lecture PDFs, question and answer sheets.
PDF Printouts
Lewis loves the printout function in OneNote, which allows you to see all the pages of your document. It is by doing this that Lewis is able to annotate lecture notes. Unfortunately, my screen is frozen now. So I have to close the app, and open it again to see if I get any response from it. There you go, and what Lewis loves even more about the setup is all the space around this PDF that you get in OneNote. When you run out of space, you can write on the app’s infinite canvas.
The question and answer sheets have to be in one document, according to Lewis’ workflow. I had put mine on different pages, so let me move them quickly. So, after answering some questions on the question paper, Lewis can print out the answer on the side to check them. I thought these would align, but it depends on the number of pages in each document. But, still, not to worry because there’s a workaround. Such a setup is not possible in Goodnotes, so Lewis was happy with OneNote for a while.
However, OneNote turned out to be buggy on the iPad. The ‘printout’ function displayed blurry text on the PDF when zooming in. Upon searching the OneNote Reddit, Lewis learnt that this is a problem had been present for many years and Microsoft had not bothered to fix it. We haven’t experienced such a bug in our case, but we saw the app crash a few times. Blurry pages in OneNote, besides the bug, can also be caused by a slow internet connection because OneNote is always downloading and uploading things online. It’s not a strict web app, but it might as well be. So rapid movements and changes may take seconds to hours to respond. OneNote has a tendency of doing that. Because of this bug, Lewis needs an alternative for OneNote that imports PDFs on an infinite canvas.
Tried Solutions
Apple Notes
Apple Notes has not worked because the app can’t zoom in. Lewis made this enquiry a long time ago, and somethings have changed. Most handwriting note-taking apps open PDF as notebooks, not on an infinite canvas. I am going to import the two documents we need to put side by side. That is a question paper and its answers. In iPadOS 18, you can zoom in and out of your PDFs now. Make them as large or small as you want. This document has pages of varying sizes, so let me quickly delete some. The problem I see with this setup, unlike in OneNote, is that our documents are one above the other, so you can’t compare them side by side. For that, I suggest using multiple instances. It’s a decent workaround.
Another advantage of using Apple Notes is that you can open the document to freely work on the questions without much distraction from the rest of the app. But this setup, Lewis probably had in Goodnotes, and didn’t like it. Besides, using Apple Notes also means Lewis loses the infinite canvas to write lecture notes which OneNote has.
Apple Freeform
Apple Freeform was another option that didn’t work because the app doesn’t display PDFs. It only attaches them with no ability to interact with them. The app had no folders, it is useless for a student. This one, our team also ruled out. Then we went digging, and we found this…
Our Solution
Prodrafts is an app we haven’t reviewed yet, but it’s definitely on our to-do list. It is one of the few apps that creates notebooks with infinite pages. You can then drag and drop your questions and answers into the app. It gives you the closest to the OneNote experience, where your PDFs are close to each other and you can still write around them if you ever need to. However, writing on the PDF itself is not straightforward; watch what happens when I scroll the page. The ink is not moving with the page we wrote this on. That is why you have to annotate or write on your PDF in a separate window. So, that was just a minor bug; nothing closing the app won’t fix. You have this huge infinite canvas to write on, and your PDFs side by side.
