PDF Annotation Coordination

[rtbs-dev]

This looks like a fantastic note-taking and knowledge structuring app. I will say though, most of my potential use case is in making notes/annotations for academic papers, which generally means PDF's. I understand that storing/displaying/annotating pdf's is not the point of this, primarily markdown-oriented system, but I am wondering if it would be possible to incorporate some sort of meta-organization of a PDF library as markdown notes explicitly linked to individual files.

I found the Highlights app that actually produces markdown files directly (which presumably could be imported and tracked with mindforger) but it's sadly Mac only, I guess? Any ideas on what a potential work-flow might look like?

[ramu-r]

Managing annotations is a very visual process like marking notes on the sides of pages while managing notes is brain work which is about hierarchy, tags and linking between notes.

For me, mindforger specializes in the second area while I use different tools for the first part. For eg, a good annotation and pdf management tool would be polar bookshelf. You could probably annotate in that and store the notes within mindforger. Sadly polar doesn't support export to markdown right now I think. Still, I suggested polar because that's seemed like exactly what you are looking for.

[rtbs-dev]

@ramu-r that looks fantastic, I'll definitely take a look. I wonder if there's potential for either

1. the polar bookshelf dev team supporting basic markdown export/sync, or
2. support for importing the json annotation data into mindforger as individual notes.

Will certainly look into this. In the meantime, the pointer to polar bookshelf is much appreciated, surprised I haven't come across this before!

[burtonator]

Hey @tbsexton ... I'm the author of polar...

The annotations are in .json files and should be easy to convert to markdown.

It's requested enough that it will happen someday I'm sure. We also want to support a generic sync infra so people can work with whatever tools they want to. I think that it would be silly to assume that one note taking too would work perfectly for everyone with Polar so maybe the ability to support plugins will enable some of this functionality.

But for now you could just scan ~/.polar looking for .json data and importing them.

[dvorka]

@tbsexton Annotation coordination is really great idea!

One of my main goals is to make MindForger true personal knowledge management application. By personal I mean ability to capture knowledge in a concise way using my own words. After reading a book chapter/paper/Wikipedia topic/internet article I strive to formulate what I learned in a few concise sentences (and possibly image) which are better understandable to me. I strive to capture the essence of the subject. Whenever I return back to such note I'm able to quickly recall what I learned and I can use references (original paper/Wikipedia/article/...) to read a comprehensive description.

Annotations are exactly the same - they capture the essence of what you read, associations, ideas or feedback which is exactly the type of knowledge I want to manage with MindForger.

Thank you @ramu-r for recommending Polar Bookshelf!

@tbsexton Polar Bookshelf really looks fantastic! Unfortunately I didn't use it in the past, however, I'm sure that this is what I was looking for recently. I discussed MindForger with several (academic) researches and I think that synergy of both applications could bring functionality they need. After I get familiar with Polar Bookshelf I will try to come with a reasonable integration to get most of both applications.

Thank you all for great ideas, inspiration and suggestions! This is why I enjoy working on MindForger - I value any opportunity to discuss interesting topics with smart people.