Frequently Asked Questions

Do you currently have any promotions?

Yes! Mention us on Twitter @sumnotesnet with a short description about how Sumnotes is making you more productive. Shoot an email to support@sumnotes.net with the link to your tweet and we'd be happy to give you a trial month.

How do I cancel my subscription?

You can cancel your subscription by navigating to your Profile Page and using the "Cancel Subscription" button'

What happens to a cancelled subscription?

If you cancel your subscription before the end of the term, you will still have all your privileges until the end of the term. When the current term ends, your account will be automatically downgraded to the free tier.

Where do you store my password?

Your password gets encrypted and then stored on Google's servers. We follow the best practice recommendation with this approach and avoid storing your passwords on our servers at all.

Do you share or sell my data with third parties?

We do not share or sell your data to third parties. Our business is not in the advertisement or data sharing domain and will never be. That being said, we use Google services for authentication purposes and a few buttons for engaging with us on Linkedin and Twitter.

How do you ensure data security of my annotations and my PDFs?

We maintain live copies of your data in 3 continents of this very planet. Communication between you and our servers is encrypted. Storage is protected by a combination of encryption and access restrictions.

How do I delete my account?

You can request account removal at any time.
Deleting your account will mark your account for a purge within a grace period of approximately 24 hours. Your data will be automatically restored if you sign back into your account within the grace period. However, after the grace period is over, your data (such as your account entry, annotations, uploaded or processed content) will be automatically purged from our servers. Once your data is purged we will not be able to restore it. The payment information will be permanently saved, but it will be dis-associated from your deleted account.

PDF page numbers vs. annotation page numbers, and why are they different sometimes?

You might occasionally see that the page number for the extracted annotation might differ from the actual page number that is indicated in the document.

A good example for this would be a PDF file that has a few blank pages at the beginning, while the actual book starts a few pages down the line. Some PDF files contain specific metadata for this - it is called Page Label, which normally has page numbers, section numbers, etc. i.e. V, VII, VIII or 1A, 1B, 1C, 2B, etc.... Unfortunately it is not supported in all PDF documents.

In order to avoid unpredictable behaviour and bugs, Sumnotes simply assigns a sequential page number to each annotation. For example, if there is one blank page at the beginning of the document, and the annotation is on the following page, the page number assigned to the annotation would be 2.

We have looked into several ways of making this straightforward and not too confusing, so that there is a clear understanding on what "Page Labels" are and what is the simple page count that starts from 1 no matter what. As a simple workaround, Sumnotes will allow you to offset any number of pages from the top, so that you can line up the sequential page numbers and the actual page numbers of the document.

Why can't I see annotations made in Mendeley?

Mendeley saves its annotation data inside a special database called sqlite (you can read more about sqlite here). Mendeley also encrypts this database thus preventing anyone from seeing the contents of the annotations database.

Encryption key that is used for encryption key is only known to Mendeley.

There are ways to decrypt said database, but it requires access to the customer’s machine which is impossible due to security implications and is not scalable as a business.

Unfortunately Sumnotes neither can promote nor comment on specifics of how to achieve this, so you will need to do your own research (there are example on the web about how to do it on your own).

How do I use Sumnotes API?

We are happy to provide access to our API (on a per request basis?).

Generally we would ask a few questions to understand the requirements: things like generic description of the use case, an approximate expected volume of queries, and so forth.

We can set you up with a developer API access for your testing/development, for free.

API pricing is usage based and is separate from the annual consumer facing subscription plan. Usually, our API customers start small and grow with us if their customer base grows.

Evernote not working?

The best way to get around majority of issues with Evernote, is to log into your Evernote account and revoke access to Sumnotes.

Next time you try to connect your evernote account, you should get a pop up asking you to authorize an Evernote account. Just make sure it’s the right account this time around and that should do the trick.

How does the predictive sorting work for PDF annotations?

A bit of background first.

The way annotations are stored inside the PDF structure is not based on how they visually appear on the page, but rather in the order they were created. So by default, if we were to extract the highlights and not order them at all, they would appear sorted by creation timestamp.

In an attempt to make the ordering more user friendly for our users, we have an option to sort the annotations based on coordinates. Specifically, by Y coordinate of the page, so that they flow from top to bottom.

While things work relatively consistently in single column files, it is very tricky to deal with multiple column files, since the PDF standard is not consistently implemented in PDF readers available on the market. That said there is no known good way of determining which highlight belongs to which column and therefore there is no good way of placing the highlights in the order you see them visually.

For this reason, since we simply ignore the X coordinate, multiple column files yield to inconsistent results when it comes to the order in which the annotations appear. You will also see occasional inconsistencies in a single column files, when there are two annotations on the same line (same Y coordinate.)

This way of sorting covers majority of our use cases, however, we would definitely love to perfect our sorting algorithm to make sure we handle ALL the use cases. Having said this we are currently working on a few ideas on how to solve this problem, without affecting all the other types of documents.

Why can't I see some highlights from certain PDF documents?

We have seen 2 major contributors to this issue:

1) OCR-ed PDFs. We do not support them yet.

2) Broken PDFs created by various PDF libraries and PDF readers.

Either way, please reach out to us, we would like to learn more about your use case and might be able to help.

Can I import my annotations from other third party services?

Yes. We currently support Amazon Kindle, Instapaper, Medium.com (coming soon).

This list will grow in the near future. One of our main goals is to provide a platform for all annotations no matter which party they come from.

How do I import annotations from Amazon Kindle?

Click on import, choose Kindle, enter your credentials for read.amazon.com, sit back, and let us do the work for you.

Please keep in mind that due to security reasons, this operation requires you to enter your credentials every time you want to import from Amazon Kindle.

How do I import annotations from Instapaper?

Click on import, choose Instapaper, enter your credentials for instapaper.com, sit back, and let us do the work for you.

Please keep in mind that due to security reasons, this operation requires you to enter your credentials every time you want to import from Instapaper.

What payment methods are supported?

We currently support PayPal and Stripe. Stripe is used for Credit Card payments.

Got feedback or questions?

Please consider visiting our Help Center. If that does not answer your question, we are always here to help!