On several occasions I have written about how I use Devonthink Pro (DTP) for scholarly writing. Although at one point I had all my information on manuscripts in a single DTP database, over the last year I have maintained separate databases; one for PDFs, another for my annotations.I accomplish this by having separate folders in Dropbox. After extracting my annotations from Highlights.app, I place the exported files in their own folder. Once a month, I export all the PDFs in my Paper’s Library to their own Dropbox folder. I use a Hazel script to throw away any duplicate PDFs in the Dropbox folder. I index (not import) the annotations folder into one DTP database, and index my PDFs into another.This setup allows a fair amount of flexibility. Not only is this setup advantageous for writing with DTP (as I will cover in my next entry), it allows easy access to my PDFs for reading with Liquidtext or listening with Voice Dream.

I have experimented with different PDF readers on my iPad. Over the past several months I’ve exclusively used a program called LiquidText.LiquidText has a unique, award-winning, interface that allows me to drag, drop, and manipulate text using my finger. LiquidText was named “Most Innovative iPad App of the Year” by Apple in 2015. LiquidText feels much more natural than any other PDF reader I’ve used on iOS--and I've used many. After highlighting with my finger, the exerpts / highlights / comments are extracted into their own area. The excerpts may be dragged around, linked, and repositioned at will.When reading and highlighting, I either drag text from the PDF into the notes area, or simply hit “AutoExcerpt” and the text is extracted for me. I can comment on the excerpted information.I can also view the place in the paper the highlight came from by merely touching the excerpt in the notes area.LiquidText reads and writes to a whole range of cloud services, but has limited range of export document choices.An Enterprise version is available for $9.99 that adds features like multi-document search and the ability to comment on multiple documents simultaneously. I've been using the app so much, I upgraded primarily to support the developer.There are a few features that are not (yet) available—the most critical for me is the inability to export highlights into a text file—LiquidText only exports highlights to Microsoft Word. This, unfortunately, is not compatible with my workflow for extracting highlights, but I like Liquidtext so much, I figured out a workaround using Skim—here is my entire workflow:

I set up a Dropbox LiquidText Folder to serve as a bridge with my desktop.
I open the entry in Papers on iOS.
From within Papers I select "open in". -this brings up action menu.

I open, read, and annotate in Liquidtext. This includes linking the full-text of references to each excerpt (as suggested by reader GH).
I export the PDF and Notes from Liquidtext to my Dropbox Folder.

When I get to my Mac, I open the PDF in Skim.
Under the File Menu in Skim, I choose “Convert Notes” making my highlights into Skim Notes.
I then process the annotations as discussed in this blog entry.
(If you want to take the time on your desktop you can also replace the Papers PDF with the LiquidText highlighted version).

Give Liquidtext a try and please let me know what you think.