Frederiko,
That photo shows what I think is the most that can be achieved within DT at this stage. Congratulations for such a well thought setup within the limited means of DT in this respect.
I will follow Frederiko’s recommendation to order the rtfs by their url page, as it shows in that neat image. Also to click in the url field - I was clicking in the links in the body of the annotations -which open the pdf in the same window as the annotation!!
But I use Annotation Pane for a different purpose. I need to keep extracted annotation separated from my commentaries because otherwise I have no way to know what my writing amounts to. I’m concerned about the accesibility to other apps and the future development of Spotlight comments, so I’ve decided to separate my own writing from the quoted annotations in separate rtf files.
If DT comes up with an Scrivener-like contiguous view of rtf files, it could be used to display annotations in a view in which it would be possible to comfortably scroll the contents of all annotations. The stream is not synced to the page viewed in the pdf, but when one piece/file of the stream is clicked (or the link in its body inserted by Annotation Pane), the original pdf context of the annotation will appear. I think this is a better solution than the aforementioned dynamic display without clicking. To give an idea of how this could look, I attach an image.
Annotation Pane links each annotation to the pdf page it is extracted from, not to the exact location within the pdf page. This is no good for coding, but perfectly alright for annotating whilst reading books, journals, etc.
Clicking rtf annotations created by Annotation Pane directs to the pdf page. Not the other way around. I manually highlight each section of the pdf I extract a rtf annotation from with Annotation Pane. If and when DT’s pdf editor comes with a side panel for pdf highlights, if its contents are editable as they are in Skim and other pdf editors, and with the added functionality to make DT hyperlinks clickable there, it might be possible for Annotation Pane to include there a DT hyperlink to the rtf annotation it creates. In this way, clicking one of the highlights in such side panel would direct to its rtf annotation inside DT.
So I am sorry (partly) to say that in this respect it is on DT’s side to evolve in order to make the best of the very good functionality Annotation Pane is targeting at! And I hope it does so, because there are people who turn to CAQDAS apps just for literature reviews and reading, as one can infer from the tutorials available online for such usage. I know this the hard way because I was one of them, first with Atlas.ti and after with Maxqda. Experience tells me that these apps are good for coding accurately many short sentences with a defined set of tags that can be remembered. And they excel at target search and analysis of combinations of the used tags. However, they lack the freer possibility to search at once file names, content and metadata; to perform on the results reading and writing related tasks, not just tagging/coding and analysis of codes; and to have the files available to external apps. DT already provides all of these. Therefore, no competition from costly CAQDAS apps because of the different feature set for different purposes (coding / annotating). And no competition from PDF editors, because they do not provide the information management functionality to rearrange each single pdf annotation via tags, search and DT’s “ai” features.
DT can achive this just by improving its very basic pdf editor with a side panel for annotations (with clickable DT hyperlinks) and the much requested Scrivener-like view of several files. As I see it, Annotation Pane can put both to an innovative and good use.
