> On 14 Mar 2022, at 10:56, Christiaan Hofman <cmhof...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 14 Mar 2022, at 10:50, Christiaan Hofman <cmhof...@gmail.com 
>> <mailto:cmhof...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On 14 Mar 2022, at 04:49, Mark Roberts <mroberts1...@gmail.com 
>>> <mailto:mroberts1...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Is there some way to get more detailed information about skim notes, i.e., 
>>> other than the code framework?
>>> 
>>> I have tried the skimnotes command line tool (e.g., the 'get' and 'format' 
>>> commands), but it seems to only output the basic information about notes, 
>>> such as the note type, page number, and note text.
>>> 
>>> Perhaps(?) there's another mode for the skimnotes tool, but I couldn't find 
>>> it from reading the documentation.
>>> 
>>> I'd like to get more complete data on each note, such as a timestamp, the 
>>> coordinates of the boxes that are highlighted in the PDF file, the 
>>> highlight color, and the text contained in each box.
>>> 
>>> I assume(?) this data is in the notes file, but the skimnotes app ignores 
>>> it for now.
>>> 
>>> I'm wondering about this because if possible I'd like to make a script that 
>>> gathers my notes for a PDF file, and tries to fix words that were broken by 
>>> hyphenation in the original PDF. If I can get the highlight boxes in the 
>>> notes file, and the text in each box, then it should be possible to check 
>>> for a hyphen character at the end of each line, and then stitch together 
>>> the words that were split across lines.
>>> 
>>> Any suggestions?
>>> 
>>> Thanks in advance,
>>> 
>>> M.
>> 
>> The skimnotes tool is not a tool that can interpret the data. It only copies 
>> the data around to various locations that are supported (such as between 
>> extended attributes, .skim files, or within a .pdfd bundle). There is no 
>> tool to interpret he data. The Wiki has information about how the data is 
>> formatted. You could try to build your own tool to unarchive the data from 
>> that, but that would be quite a bit of work.
>> 
>> Christiaan
>> 
> 
> 
> I can also note that in the near future the skim notes will be saved in a 
> plist format, which can be read by various tools and apps, including 
> AppleScript. You can already have Skim do that by activating a hidden 
> preference, see the Wiki for details. 
> 
> Christiaan
> 


I just remembered that the skimnotes tool *can* convert to the plist format, 
which you may be able to read, using the ’skimnotes format’ command.' skimnotes 
format plist SKIM_FILE' can do that. The help for skimnotes does not say so, 
but you can immediately also get the skim notes plist format from the skimnotes 
tool as follows:

skimnotes get plist PDF_FILE SKIM_FILE

This will get you a plist file in SKIM_FILE. Perhaps for other tools to read it 
you have to change the extension to .plist. You could also then pass it through 
plutil to convert the binary plist to xml plist (plutil -convert xml1 
PLIST_FILE), which would even be human readable. You could combine that to get 
the skimnotes in xml format as follows:

skimnotes get plist PDF_FILE - | plutil -format xml1 -o PLIST_FILE -

Christiaan

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