Hi Christian,
thanks for the immediate reply. I know that it is unlikely that you will
find the time to implement my feature requests, but I nontheless want to
give you my feedback about Skim:
I. The HIGHLIGHTCOLORS could be user-defined. Four to eight colors would
be enough. What keyboard are you using? Mine has 10 number keys and lots
of modifiers. (-;
But besides that there emerged bigger problems that prevent me from
using Skim
##############################
II. My workflow conceirning markers
a) I use highlighting to STRUCTURE A TEXT, help me understand it,
abbreviate, select quotations and so on - all to concentrate while
first reading and shorten and intensify reading the second time. For
this purpose most the time I dont highlight whole sentences, but just
the central sentence structure without subordinate clauses and important
phrases.
b) Besides that I want to have a system to make a EXCERPT consisting of
structured comments and selected quotations. But I dont want to show the
text of all fragmented highlights in there.
In Acrobatt I use hierarchically ordered bookmarks in which I summarize
paragraphs and chapters. Afterwards I process the PDF-File wich a
shell-script which pipes its output into my pasteboard and I paste it
into BibDesk. (example of such an excerpt at the end of this file)
What gets from Skim to Bibdesk is a - for the excerpt purpose not very
useful - list of unstructured, unreadable combination of comments and
sentence parts with no information where an sentence, paragraph or
chapter ends.
As far as I see with a bit of work I would be able to write a template
that isolates only notes and not hightlights and I could afterwards
structure the output according to a special formatingrule (e.g. notes
starting with "*" =level 1 ,"**"=level 2 and so on) I could do some
hacking on this as I did with Acrobat, but I would appreciate if it
would be possible to implement it from inside and not from outside.
This would require that Skim allows its objects to have an easy
differenciation between: INTO-EXCERPT - NOT-INTO-EXCERPT and an LEVEL of
in the structured output. On the application-side you would have to
implement 2 more xml-keys and some changes to the Notes pane - either
hierarchical or with another column containing the level /Excerpt
Status. And for the sake of readability maybe the support of multiline
entrys and the opportunity to show just the marked as excerpt entrys in
the Notes Pane.
On the user-sided this could ideally tbe accessed via key-combinations, eg:
Apple-Option- + Include selected object from excerpt
Apple-Option- - Exclude seleted object from excerpt
Apple-Option 1 to 6 for marking as Level 1 to 5 + maybe as quotation
With this feature Skim would be the best scientific learning system I know.
################################
III The migration question
When you get used to working with ebooks, you have a whole library in a
simple computer. My markers are as unvalueable for me as my library is.
1. In a few years we will maybe have electronic tint and foils we ca
load our books onto.
2. There are billions of people that want or have to learn - and paper
is a limited and very expensive ressource. Sooner or later there will be
promising inventives to program a scientific learning environment that
will have the same features as Acrobat - maybe with a integrated rating
system - allowing a democratic peer-reviewing of books on the fly.
So the simple question by now is: will I be able to read my books in a
few years in new environments and will it be as easy as taking the book
from my bookshelf?
With an proprietary format as PDF it wont be easy in any case. I maybe
will have to break OCRed files into images again, re-OCR them (in much
shorter time ond better quality) and afterwards overlay my markers over
the OCRed images.
It is likely that someone will come out with a standard solution for
this purpose for PDF-Files when the time is ready.
But it is a bit risky to rely on a marker-format that is used by a
limited number of people and not documented - especially as a
non-programmer. I would feel much more confident about using Skim if
there were a opportunity to export the comments as FDF-Files.
Another aspect about Skim in this context is that I cant change the
markers of my PDF-Files I worked on with Acrobat. If I could import
FDF-Filess this problem would be solved.
####################################################################
Acrobat comment files (FDF) on the first look seems much more easy
accesible than PDF:
I have had a short look on the - as you said rather unreadable -
xml-file and recognized, that you locate markers by specificating a
point relative to the page-measures:
{ {y points from bottom border,x points from left border} {width,height} }
As you said this is almost the same system of locating markers as Adobe.
They specify 8 coordinates in there FDF files so that there comments can
have other than rectangle forms.
I have done a little hacking with my rather low knowledge in unixshells
and are able to get the coordinates into the skim format.
cat /desk/XXX.fdf | tr "\015" "\12" | grep Quad | sed
"s/.*QuadPoints\[//" | awk -F" " {' print $1 "\," $6 "\," $3-$1 "\,"
$6-$1'}
If someone of you developers would be interested I would try to
reverse-engeneer the FDF-file-format.
####################################################################
An example excerpt generated of an PDF-File generated out of structured
bookmarks:
________________________________________________________________________________
The Exlanatory Deficit [S.2]
< - Level 1
* The Problem of Incompleteness
[S.3] <- Level 2
- Gesetzmässigkeiten lassen sich nicht finden
[S.3] <- Level 3
- Die Definition von Kontext-Variablen, die periodische Abweichung
erkläen sollen, kann nur eine unwissenschaftliches ad-hoc Einführung
sein [S.3]
* The Variable "Meaning" of Variables [S.3]
- Die Unvollständigkeit ist eine Folge eines Erklärungsdefizits [S.3]
- 2 Bedingungen verstärken das Erklärungsdefizit: [S.3]
- 1. unmerkliche Veränderung der Bedeutung von
Strukturvariablen für die Individuen [S.3] <- Level 4
- 2. Strukturzusammenhänge können oft nur als Aggregationen von
Verhaltensvariablen erklärt werden, die mit reiner Variablenanalyse
unbemerkt bleiben [S.3]
- VS diskutiert diese Probleme als Frage der funktionalen Gleichheit
von Variablen, kann aber keine Antwort darauf geben, warum eine gleiche
Variable (Alter=30) in 2 verschiedenen Gesellschaften / Regionen ewwas
anderes bedeutet [S.4]
- "In short, theassociation between particular structural
variablesand the definition of the situation by the individualsis
variable. It is this which determines social changeand cultural and
institutional differences. [S.4] <- Quotation
* Interdependency [S.4]
________________________________________________________________________________
The "Meaningless" of Variable Sociology [S.5]
________________________________________________________________________________
Theoretical Exlanation and Statistical Models [S.6]
*An Example [S.6]
________________________________________________________________________________
Why 'Rational' Choice? [S.7]
*Why has the problem not been noticed before? [S.7]
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