LiquidText for PC and Mac

Software Reviews and Criticism

• By Thadktk

  Essential for graduate coursework

  I use the multi-document for every text-heavy course session I have taken over the past year and a half. Best of all, the developer has addressed nearly every concern I have ever had. The PDF export is now extremely stable so I can preserve all my hard annotation work in a standard format which looks great in PC Preview, even when it runs to thousands of pages for a class session. It merges web pages, PDF converted books, articles, slides and images into one memorable, skim-able, and searchable PDF package. Free hand annotations closed the gap between this and Notability’s PDF support. The two suggestions remain: one low hanging and one which might be the developer’s next app: The experience of the app isn’t the same when documents don’t have searchable text paths. Partner with or recommend an app to provide Optical Character Recognition — I now use a Docker-based Tesseract tool called OCRmyPDF to wipe out spotty OCR (from e.g. old JSTOR) and rescan from the command line but I’d love some form of recommendation or integration. Second, iOS “speak” can be great for reading hands free and taking notes but since LiquidText doesn’t use standard dialogs when you turn it on in Settings, the feature doesn’t appear. Further, to support its experience well, you need a start/pause/speed control like in GoodReader but its a bit annoying to export back and forth. I may try to use iOS 11 dual-app panel mode to highlight in the mean time.

  
  
• By SCC001

  This app alone justifies the purchase of my iPad Pro

  There is nothing else that’s like this app on any of my other devices. There is no app to my knowledge that does what this app does for my reading habit. I’m a person who needs to organize my takeaway in real time as I read along. The app allows me to pull out the highlights (in the case of a pdf with recognized texts) or cutouts (image kind of pdf), place them on the side workspace, and move them as I see fit. The little arrow in front of every “takeaway” takes you to the original. You can even free-hand draw on the workspace - make arrows, connections, mind maps, concept maps, etc. This is tremendous!! Honestly, I’m still learning the capabilities of this app, but the said features already made me very happy. And unhappy, too - when I use the Kindle or other reading apps, which all seem too inadequate now. I find myself trying to convert all my books and import them into LiquidText. It’s hard to go back to the old reading style. Whenever I have a question, I just hit the button with a question mark in the app. Within hours (sometimes just minutes) someone answers my question. Now that’s really classy. How many other apps do that? I don’t care if it’s a robot or real person (which I believe it is - if it’s a robot, it’s a very good one!) I feel the company cares. That’s really really good.

  
  
• By ecuwiumiu

  Nothing else like it but one major draw back

  This app is great for all the reasons you’ll see in the other reviews, but it has a total show stopper for me and I suspect for others concerned with possibly losing data. I recently restored my iPad as new without restoring from a backup, a good practice now and then to get rid of all the software cruft that accumulates over years and can persist after restoring from backups. I assumed all my LiquidText work was synced/stored in iCloud and would repopulate in the app once I opened it and it had time to sync. Well, I didn’t realize that it’s not actually synced, it’s just stored in the iCloud backup which is just a meaningless blob of data unless you restore the whole iPad from it. Fortunately I didn’t have anything too important in LiquidText at the time so it was just an annoyance rather than a disaster. I highly recommend they switch to iCloud syncing, as Notability for example has had for a while now, versus just backing up with the iPad backup. Notability doesn’t have the same features I love in LiquidText, but I will switching to it for dealing with PDFs until iCloud syncing is enabled. Otherwise a great app.

  
  
• By Sound.Ship

  Genius App But NOT STABLE.

  I LOVE the concept of this. Especially when it first came out. Unfortunately, the file browser (what you use half the time when dealing with pdf's) feels like it was an after thought. In fact, I don't think this portion of the app has been updated once since I purchased it. Something that other apps do easily with a drag and drop, like moving a file into a folder right above it, will take you no less than 4 taps. Depending on how organized you want to be, this can take 20+ taps to simply move a file into a folder right beside the file. It's unfortunately the least intuitive file browser I've ever used. This is unfortunate because the use of its PDF functionality is supreme for research. But due to not wanting to deal with more than one PDF at once in the file browser, I resort to only using this app for specific, niche-like, projects. PLEASE UPDATE THE FILE BROWSER AND I WILL UPDATE MY REVIEW RATING TO 5 STARS! PLEASE. UPDATE: I have the newest iPad Pro. This app now crashes in every file that I edit. I have to exit and save after each edit or I lose all progress. Please fix this and I will update my review!

  
  

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