Frequently Asked Questions

How do I stop auto-renew on my subscription?

Navigate to your and press the "Stop auto-renew" button. You will keep your Pro status until your subscription ends and you will not be automatically renewed.

Why was my refund amount not equal to the amount I paid?

Our payment processor charges a commission per every customer transaction. This means that the money you pay us, is not reaching our bank account in its entirety. In case a refund is issued, the payment processors in most cases, do not refund the transaction fees. We personally do not agree with their stance on this, but there is nothing we can do. Therefore, to continue providing an extremely affordable service, we reserve the right to withhold a transaction fee off of your refund amount which will cover the endless greediness of payment processors. In addition, we may prorate the refund based on the time you reached out to us. However, if the disputed charge happened more than 45 calendar days ago we will not issue a refund.

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. These providers might gather and share information about you.

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

We maintain live copies of your data in 3 continents 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?

and tell us about your requirements.

API pricing is usage based and is separate from the consumer subscription plans. 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 and follow instructions about installing our official Chrome Extension.

Our official Chrome Extension does not require access to your Amazon account password.

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 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!