In November 2021, LiquidText released a big update; version 5.0 to introduce syncing & backup. Let’s see what our developers have been up to since then.
Version 5.1: OCR
Sometimes, when you’re stuck with a scanned PDF, it’s a tremendous help to interact with scanned documents the same way you would with native PDFs. The OCR engine in LiquidText now lets you study your scanned PDFs interactively; highlight, extract editable sections, tag, etc. Anything you can do on native PDFs, you can do on your scans.
LiquidText supports OCR for eight languages. You can turn on Instant OCR so you can interact with your pages as though they are native PDFs. LiquidText also has some default options for how the app interacts with OCR text detection with new documents.
While trying out this feature, we decided to check whether the app has improved how it deals with column text. It actually has, which is more good news. How exciting is that? The general performance of the app has improved. It’s saving and closing projects faster than before.
Version 5.2: integration with reference managers
You can now integrate LiquidText with Zotero and Mendeley. Unfortunately, we’ve not been able to log in to Zotero because the keyboard is not popping up to let us sign in. This is a bug we hope our developers can fix soon because we are curious to try out this integration.
Version 5.4
Version 5.4 released the most updates. LiquidText is becoming a better research tool with every update our developers release. More intense testing is required to test its speed, but, we’ve already started noticing some loading improvements, which is exciting indeed.
Copy link
The copy link feature is the most awesome new feature in LiquidText, even more than OCR. You can copy the link of a selection, excerpt (extraction), or project to paste it anywhere (another project, app, etc). The app creates a simple link with a relevant citation when you paste the link.
Tapping on the citation takes you back to the source with a single tap. The trick to opening the links from third-party apps is to make sure LiquidText is open. When the app is closed, links display an error message. Let’s hope that in the future we’ll be able to open links even when the app is closed. But this setup also works, really, no complaints.
Now it makes sense why they improved the app’s speed. This would require the app to close the current project and open the linked one. With LiquidText’s previous speeds, this would have been a painful experience to go through.
It would be better if the app supported multiple instances. For research, it might help to open the document in another window while keeping the current one open. That’s not how hyperlinks work, though, but it wouldn’t hurt, right?
You can paste this link into other apps: word processors, note-taking apps that support links, calendars, to-do, etc. The possibilities are endless. You can also link to search results or multiple sections. Saving search results can help if you regularly repeat the same search.
Improved search
When you search your notes, you can now Select All your found results to highlight, Comment, Select More, extract, or tag. These are all the options we have for our PDF reading in LiquidText, but they are now available for all your searched terms (at once). You can also do this with searched tags.
Replace newer versions
You can now replace documents with newer versions in LiquidText. The app asks you how the new document is different. Does it have new pages? Did you remove some or just reorder them? You can then choose the updated document and compare each page before you confirm the replacement. The app seems to only replace the one page that you have added or removed. It does not recognise any annotations you make elsewhere. We hope, in the future, we’ll be able to replace all the pages in the document and import the annotations made in other places.
Those are the latest updates from LiquidText. They are all very exciting, and they make the app an even more powerful research tool. We look forward to seeing more updates! LiquidText has improved dramatically since it went subscription, which is good to see. At least those who subscribe get value for their money.
