it is enlightening, and a breeze. also thx for – in the course of it – asking that interesting notetaking question (– see also Favorite External Editors for Notes in macOS & iOS) … and pointing to Keypoints!
it is good to know; and certainly the question of exegesis vs. topology (and other fundamental aspects of excertping and annotation) is a central one for (post-)humanities. as btw is the inherent question of excerpting vs annotation that is itself another complexion to streamline…
– I have also found over the years that folding the whole research system into one-or-two apps doesn´t work (as good as e.g. DT is), as one always ‘bends’ an application agst its architecture – and it´s just a permanent uphill-struggle agst affordance/habit/flow to do that. (so I am still struggling to make DT a really useful app for visual / image research (the ‘other’ form of information), which just behaves differently than text-centric research…)
for this reason I for myself arrived at MarginNote (currently MarginNote3 for excerpting PDF (and other material as websites!). it not only allows different views of notes, tagging them, filtering them according to metadata and other clue systems – but also brings a full-blown mind-mapping solution along with it (actually one that can keep up with all the pro-apps, which I do not list here!). – this mindmap has different rather sensational aspects to it – besides giving a visual rendering and backtracking to the linear exceprts/annotations: (a) it can itself be manipulated (sorting, moving, linking, further annotations that write back to the ‘PDF notes’!, etc.) (b) it can be exported as interactive pdf, going out alongside the notes/excerpts (besides all the options to export single notes, note sets with backlinks etc.) (c ) different excerpt-maps can be combined, manipulated and searched as topological/conceptual maps (search generally is another strongpoint of MN).
there are some weaknesses/drawbacks of course: PDFs have to ‘live’ in MN; the UI needs some getting used too (it´s the kind of you either love or hate it; or just get along…); and (like with Keypoints and others) it neccessitates a rather elaborate personal workflow/protocol to keep things in sync with whatever the personal system in DT is.
– anyway I thought I drop a mention of it, as it relates to several of the mentioned aspects/questions in this thread (including the OPs question).
I’d be interested to hear if you ever do find a reliable app or tool for scanning in handwritten notes and having them be recognized by OCR. I swear I should have been Dr., and am trying to avoid having to transcribe by hand if it’s at all possible I have quite a few notebooks/journals I’d like to scan for posterity and then potentially free up the physical space.
Readdle’s app is not going to be able to OCR handwriting, though. I imagine it will be a struggle to find an app that will do it. MyScript by Nebo on the iPad has a very good handwriting recognition engine, but as far as I know it is only for recognising text as you are writing it.
As to Liquid Text, I thought it was going to be wonderful, but ended up never using it because whatever you did was effectively trapped inside that application. Export was not good (though I suppose it might have improved since I last used it a coupld of years ago). The same applies to MarginNote. Nice in some ways, but difficult to export material to other programs.
No need to tear them out if I don’t want to. I have a standing scanner like library would use, just really started playing around with it and trying to get through the massive heap of journals and books chocked full of annotations class notes, and any other paper item cluttering up my apartment. Less than stoked about the results of OCR, likely due to my chickenscratch, but I still need to double check the printed text as well to get a little better idea whether that’s all it is. I know DT had been having issues with OCR a while back too (basing this solely off of general forum chatter) , not sure if it’s been resolved.
I am, though I wouldn’t say that they are necessarily related to DT, like I said probably has something to do with the quality of my chicken scratch handwriting. I’d want to go back and look at some of the stuff I’ve imported via my scanner too. The fact that it has it’s own OCR that it runs makes it difficult to parse out where the breakdown is coming from.
But the handwritten journals I compiled to archive for myself in Devonthink are completely unreadable, at least according to the OCR when I ran concordance using one of the previuos tips posted here to verify the accuracy of the OCR in DT, so I’m assuming that problems exsited at least on some level.
??? I"m confused, thought I threw the caveat in there that observation was based solely off of general forum chatter since I hadn’t been able to figure out where the issue was originating from.
