Highlighting And Annotating

HighLight, Annotation, Note Taking

Key to My Digital Gardening Process

Original Context

Types of content I want to handle consistently

I want to be able to (on an Android Tablet)

  • highlight arbitrarily-long contiguous blocks of text (might cross paragraph boundaries)
  • have those highlights be visible when I come back to that text
  • be able to attach my own notes to any arbitrary point
  • have a view of all-highlights-and-notes in the document, ideally broken down by chapter/section, which I can click on to jump to that place
  • export all-highlights-and-notes for a document so I can copy/paste them elsewhere (either this WikiLog or my Private Wiki). (I will end up editing, at least partially to mix in WikiWord-s.)
    • needs to distinguish the quotes/highlights from my notes, while mixing them in a single "chronological" list
    • needs to be PlainText - some kind of SmartAscii would be nice
      • HTML would be acceptable
    • would be nice to have some sort of link/pointer back to the source point (Paragraph Addressable), though that would probably have to be to a Book Server.

As of Sept'2017

I think a side-effect of this is that I Write Only The Highlights.

How well do ebook-reader apps do this? (Oct'2012)

FBReader

  • only supports EPub not other formats
  • lets you highlight chunks of text
  • can copy highlight as you make it, to paste elsewhere
  • highlights are not visible as you read
  • list of bookmarks/highlights in view is in order you made/viewed them, not fixed in source-order.
  • can't add your own notes
  • can't export collection of highlights - they're in a SQLite db, but the user can't get to that.

AlDiko - free

  • lets you select text to copy/paste but has no Highlighting or even Bookmarking!

AlDiko - paid

  • clearly has Highlighting but can't tell whether can export them. Submitted ticket to ask.
    • Answer: We currently don't have export option, we will forward your feedback to our production team for further consideration.

MoonReader - ooh I see posts mentioning export of highlights! And it does PDF and HTML and lots of other languages! I'm buying it!

  • Yes, I can Select All my highlights/notes and "Share" (email) them with myself, from which I paste into a Private Wiki or WikiLog page. (No sort of "location" data for each highlight. Have to use Search to find the original context.)
  • Boy I wish this was an InstaPaper client.
    • InstaPaper has a feature to assemble all your selections into a single big EPub. But considering how random my working-through of the backlog is, I don't really like that process much....

Man Tano?


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