Questions about rethinking Annotation, Tags, and Notes

[jprint714]

@korm

IMO, Highlights and TagNotate both offer interesting new twists on PDF annotation, but to compare them is somewhat like “I love my Mini Cooper because it reminds me of my Chevy Tahoe”. The only thing at the interesection of a Highlights and TagAnnote Venn diagram is “PDF”, otherwise they are completely different feature sets and, more importantly, approaches to the technology of annotation.
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If Highlights were to incorporate TagNotate’s approach it means the developer of Highlights would choose a non-standard approach (and thuse potentially reduce the size of its market). Never say never – but these are the aspects one needs to be aware of when choosing one of these softwares.

I hear you, @korm… That’s my sense of it as well. While there’s not much overlapping area between these two apps in a Venn diagram, and (as you rightly point out) they do represent different approaches to annotation, it sure would be nice to have both features – and…have text links for Highlights and TagNotate-created tags (or tagging features in another iPad app) that could be transferable to DTP.

For me, that would represent the best of both worlds; I’d use TagNotate’s tags for notable annotations (e.g., a topic that’s esp. relevant to a current work issue), and then rely on Highlights’ captured annotations and text links for for other areas that I’s mark up (which could be important but not necessarily tag-worthy, or when I’m racing through an article and just want to quickly highlight area w/o tagging everything). And if these feature could work w/in DTP, then we’d really be cooking w/ gas! Maybe this is a pipe dream, but it does seem like a great solution, no?

@korm

Also, btw, Highlights produces Markdown natively – discussed in the original post I made here about Hightlights.

Yes, I certainly noticed that as I was exploring Highlights. Since our discussion, I’ve started setting up a text expander app (seems many people suggest aText these days). I’ve been reading up on Markdown, and trying to understand how it would help me w/ my work. I’ve been using TextEdit or some of the DTP templates (e.g., the Phone Notes template) when I write up notes during interviews, or transcribe them, or for other assorted note taking. I don’t write code (if that wasn’t glaringly obvious!), which seems to be what Markdown is partly known for. Anyway, I’m trying to better understand its benefits for my uses… Is there a particular Markdown app that you could suggest for me, given the kinds of things I’d use it for? Thanks!

@jprint714

wondering if you have a different work process for annotating, note-taking, and tags

@korm

Nothing of general interest that I haven’t already discussed over the years.

Dang! Ok, no worries at all, @korm… I just find I learn a ton from you in your posts, and it almost always helps my work in some ways. In that way I was thinking that if I understood your cradle-to-grave approach to reading, annotating, filing and storing stuff, I might be able appropriate a different, more efficient work process – that’s all. I outlined how I work here: [url]Put up Example page] but expect there’s probably a better, cleaner way of doing this… Again, no worries – you’ve already been incredibly generous. Was just curious…