[js189]

It would be really helpful if it was possible to merge the annotations made in two tablets while synchronization in such a way that both annotations are kept. In my case, my wife and me are singing in a small ensemble and we both make annotations for our voice in the same scores. When merging, I would like to keep both annotations for the database. It would already help if this option would be available in the interactive, per-file decision how to synchronize two files.

(There are already threads about merging annotations in the book-mode directly while annotating, this seemed to be something different to me.)
Btw: Great app, full of useful functionality, thank you for your dedication!

[Zubersoft]

Merging annotations is a can of worms.  While it makes sense for situations where the annotations are completely separate on each device, what about situations where there is overlap? I can't identify matching annotations based on characteristics, because they can be modified and there is no unique identifier or naming scheme for them. About the best I could offer is a simple merging feature where it just combines the annotations on each device with no intelligence about handling conflicts. So if the same annotations existed on each device, it would just duplicate all those annotations. The problem is explaining this to users - they aren't going to understand the limitations of the feature, and there will be unhappy users due to the fact that the app can't intelligently figure out how to merge all of the annotations. So the question is whether it's worth it to add the feature given all of the major limitations, and the potential for users getting different results than they are expecting.

This also introduces major issues when just performing a simple sync. If you sync to a cloud folder, it has a database in the cloud to keep track of what has been synchronized. Let's say you have a song with a lot of annotations and you merge that to the cloud folder. Then you add a few new annotations. Currently, MobileSheets just replaces all of the annotations in the cloud database with whatever is on the tablet - simple. However, if I try to support a concept of "merging", MobileSheets can't know which annotations are which in both libraries (I can't just use database ID as that could be different especially when multiple users merge to the same folder), so what should it do? Duplicate all of the annotations again due to there being a few new annotations? That doesn't make sense. So there is no way to support merging in this scenario. It's largely the same case when merging between devices - for the first sync it may be fine, but future syncs would then have the issue of duplicated annotations. I just don't like the idea of adding an option that handles a scenario 5% of the time correctly that will give undesired results the other 95% of the time. It becomes an advanced feature that only advanced users should utilize, which means it would need to be hidden away unless the user enabled advanced settings.

If you want a somewhat simple solution to this problem, do the following:

1) On device one, embed all the annotations.
2) On device two, leave the annotations in MobileSheets.
3) Sync the libraries with the option to prompt user for decisions
4) Accept the file from device one when prompted
5) Accept the annotations from device two when prompted

This will then merge all the annotations together. The only limitation is that the annotations from device one will not be editable unless you enable the "Allow editing of embedded PDF annotations" in the annotations editor. Alternatively, you can embed the annotations on device one, send the PDF to the second device, use the swap file feature, then sync or optionally embed the annotations and then sync.

Mke