Highlighting And Annotating

HighLight, Annotation, Note Taking

Key to My Digital Gardening Process

Original Context

• 2007-04-25-ReadingMachineIWant
• 2012-03-29-FbreaderHighlightsControl

Types of content I want to handle consistently

• EBooks: EPub
• PDF
• (all, but esp long-form) web content) - e.g. InstaPaper

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

• Nexus Six instead of Tablet
• MoonReader for My Book Reading Process, emailing whole-book highlights to myself
• InstaPaper for articles, using API to scrape highlights
• highlights from either source end up in either my WikiLog or my PrivateWiki

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?