> [!question] This was the reply I intended to submit to the devoloper of the fabulous **[BookFusion e-reader](http://bookfusion.com)** (cross-platform!), in [the BookFusion subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/BookFusion/comments/zane3t/comment/l2e1krr) – but the reply apparently got so long that the subreddit refuses to accept it. I’m therefore publishing it here (and posting a link to this page to the subreddit). *** Hi Dwayne, Thank you for your reply! I also received a reply from Readwise support, confirming that their new Readwise Reader, for *now*, doesn't support any "external" highlights (not made in the new app itself), so that's why the highlights from BookFusion aren't showing up there. (Although their help files somewhat confusingly claim that their new and old app are in perfect sync.) The highlights from BookFusion do now appear in the "old" Readwise app, which is good enough for me. And they now appear promptly after that initial hiccup, and they also appear in Obsidian. (In two versions: as&nbsp;submitted by the Readwise plugin for Obsidian, and as submitted by the BookFusion plugin for Obsidian. Unfortunately, they are more mangled in Obsidian when submitted by the BookFusion plugin; more on that below.) As to the new Readwise Reader app: yeah, EPUBs and PDFs can be read directly in it, and it's cross-platform, but its *reading* interface is much below BookFusion (let alone Moon+ Reader or Marvin), so I don't think it's really a competition for BookFusion in this regard. 🙂 > You click the highlight and then the tag icon to add tags to highlights. Well, OK. It just seems that adding tags in BookFusion is rather a chore, compared to Readwise, where it's a breeze. Tagging by itself tends to be an annoying and time-consuming activity (though with significant rewards later on), so it should be made as easy as possible. It also seemed to me as if some tags I created in BookFusion disappeared later on or were not saved properly, but perhaps I'm mistaken. > Can you share more details on the difficulty you have making tags? It just takes too many taps/clicks, for my taste, to get to *see* tags in BookFusion in the first place. You first need to go to the *Highlights* section, then click the tiny filter icon, and then scroll through the list of tags... It seems like it takes a lot more effort than necessary. In contrast, in Readwise, there's a *Tags* section directly on the homepage, you tap/click on it, you instantly see the list of *all* tags, you can sort them (for example) by frequency, etc. Tags are far more accessible in Readwise than in BookFusion. What I'm missing is the option to *publicly share* the collection of highlights with a particular tag (or a&nbsp;particular *combination* of tags). I don't think this is currently supported by either BookFusion or Readwise. Yesterday, I posted a feature request about this [in the Readwise subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/readwise/comments/1cimprn/comment/l2tvdtz). If you made those public sharing options available in BookFusion, that would be great. BookFusion does already support the public sharing of *individual* highlights, which is great. Well, it's only great if the highlight *isn't* mangled – but it frequently is, unfortunately, so it would require manual fixing before publicly sharing it. Therefore, it would be useful for BookFusion to give us the same ability that Readwise gives us: to manually fix the highlights that get mangled upon import/export. Both BookFusion and Readwise mangle/distort highlights upon import/export, but currently only Readwise provides the option to fix those formatting errors manually. > What format do you export to? I prefer Markdown, although HTML is fine, too. Sometimes, PDF could come in handy as well. (Although I generally detest PDFs; only EPUBs are proper e-books, of course.) 😛 I never export highlights via CSV, precisely because all formatting would get lost. > We should be retaining the format For *some* books (especially neatly, professionally formatted EPUBs), you do, but for others (especially PDFs), you don't. If you're interested, I can email you specific examples of highlights from PDFs where BookFusion failed to (for example) retain paragraph breaks, bold formatting, etc. In Readwise, it's a breeze and a matter of seconds to fix those formatting errors manually, but BookFusion currently doesn't provide the option. There's one neat Readwise highlighting feature that you might perhaps consider supporting in BookFusion. In Readwise, if it encounters highlights that contain the prompts `.c1`, `.c2`, `.c3` (etc.) in the first line of the note attached to a highlight, it then *combines* ("concatenates") all such highlights into a single highlight. That's extremely useful! ✌️ Because I frequently don't highlight entire *paragraphs* of text, but only the most important sentences within the paragraph(s). For example, the following quote, as imported from BookFusion to Readwise, appears as a neat *single* highlight in Readwise (thanks to the `.c1`, `.c2`, `.c3`, `.c4` prompts), just as I intended it, whereas it appears as *4 separate and disjointed highlights* in BookFusion's list of highlights: ![[concatenated_highlight-Clear-Atomic_Habits.png]] > Your account probably got rate limited at their end temporarily if you were syncing a lot of highlights Sync delays are now gone, but that couldn't have been the reason, anyway. I only have a couple of dozens of highlights in total in BookFusion for now. You see, I'm still stuck in the (now defunct) Marvin on my iPads after all these years, and in Moon+ Reader Pro on Android devices (including the 5 Onyx e-ink tablets I possess), and in Adobe Acrobat Reader for PDFs on both platforms. Although I do have BookFusion installed on all my mobile devices (including the 5 e-ink tablets). BookFusion is very respectable as e-reader software, but it still isn't quite up there with Marvin, Moon+ Reader or Adobe Reader in terms of feature parity. I admire your perseverance over the years, though, Dwayne, and I'm sure you can get there one day and surpass those older e-readers in terms of quality. Your most recent triumph is the Obsidian plugin for BookFusion. It's just fabulous! And the Readwise plugin is just as fabulous. (I don't really mind I need to initiate the sync manually every time.) So, these Readwise and Obsidian plugins are now something where BookFusion definitely surpasses, say, Marvin. I think I saw a Readwise plugin for Moon+ Reader (not sure about an Obsidian plugin), but there is probably no Readwise/Obsidian plugin for Adobe Reader, right? In any case, given your Obsidian and Readwise plugins, I'm now for the first time seriously considering ditching Marvin, Moon and Adobe Reader after all these years, transitioning to BookFusion. But I would definitely miss those Marvin, Moon, and Adobe Reader features currently still not available in BookFusion, so it's a dilemma. If you recall, in the MobileRead forum in September 2022, I submitted a [list of BookFusion bugs/missing features/wishes](https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=4254411&postcount=50) to you. Some of them you have, in the meantime, implemented in BookFusion (many thanks for *custom fonts*, for example – no. 4 on my list back then). But there are still no <b><span style="color:#00b050">custom background textures</span></b> in BookFusion for now, right? It's the no. 1 on my list of missing BookFusion features... and really an outstanding feature of both Marvin and *especially* glorious in Moon+ Reader Pro. No. 3 is pretty much a showstopper for me. BookFusion still doesn't support <b><span style="color:#00b050">freehand drawing/annotation</span></b> of PDF files, right? Yet this is an *essential and elementary* feature in Adobe Reader. I just don't see how BookFusion can seriously compete with Adobe Reader if the support for freehand drawing/annotation still isn't there. Yup, you offer the workaround of "area highlights" in&nbsp;PDFs – but that's really awkward, time-consuming and cumbersome, compared to the carefree scribbling with your finger in Adobe Reader, Xodo, or GoodReader. I really believe that any PDF reader worth its salt should support freehand drawing/annotations as an obvious feature. You see, a highlight in a photographed/scanned PDF file (with no text converted/OCR-ed in it) may frequently begin in the *middle* of a paragraph, and especially in the middle of a *line* of text. How are you, then, supposed to mark those highlights in BookFusion? "Area highlights" assume that each and every highlight is a perfect rectangle. Yet that's typically not the case in reality at all. A highlight may start anywhere in the *middle* of a line, and likewise it may *end* anywhere in the *middle* of another line, and then it's impossible to mark it with the perfect rectangle of an "area highlight". How much easier it is – in Adobe Reader, Xodo, or GoodReader – simply to draw your finger across any line(s) of text to instantly mark it/them as a highlight, even in a photographed/scanned PDF file that claims to contain no "text"! But despite all these huge drawbacks, the Readwise and Obsidian plugins are definitely triumphs for BookFusion, so I'm on the fence now. 🤔 One of my friends, when I told him about the new Obsidian plugin for BookFusion, immediately turned into a *paying* subscriber of yours (in a higher tier than myself, even), although he used to be just a free user until recently.