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Are Digital "Margin Notes" Possible Yet? 49

Posted by Cliff from the a-good-idea-seeking-an-implementation dept.
Stavo asks: "I'm looking for a robust, reliable personal knowledge management solution. As a professional researcher, I read a lot of text-based content. I prefer to mark up content, by underlining or adding margin notes. I also need to retrieve and search content. The low tech solution is printing the text and using a pen to mark up, then filing the papers. If I want to quote a source, I have to type the quote. With the advent of Tablet PCs and similar tech, I'd like to find a way to keep the content digital. In other words, if I download an journal article in PDF or HTML, how can I mark it up, save it, and later search/retrieve it? Shouldn't computers provide a better solution than voluminous file cabinets filled with dead trees?"
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Are Digital "Margin Notes" Possible Yet? More

Are Digital "Margin Notes" Possible Yet?

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  • You're describing something that I have wanted to build ever since my advisor started handing me papers to read left, right and center. Unfortunately (or not, depending on how you look at it), I haven't had enough time to do more than think, "wow, what I really want is a database that can hold these papers, do some kind of semi-intelligent indexing, keep notes, and figure out what the BibTeX entry should be."

    From the little bit of research that I've done, a lot of the pieces for this are already out there (i.e. APIs for manipulating PDFs, database engines, indexing engines, etc.) but I just haven't had the time to put any of it together. Anyways, if anyone does have an answer please let me know about it ;-)

    • I haven't had to do this, but it seems to me like you could get a long ways with a scanner, some OCR software, and a search engine or some shell/Perl scripts.

      Is this really that hard or do your needs go far beyond the capabilities of what I just described?
      • i (like the poster, i think) want this all in one place. like i said, most of the pieces are out there, but there's no glue yet. more to the point, i'm lazy --- i don't want to spend any more time thinking about how to make this work than trying to remember what the command to start the executable is. much more effort and it's time that should be spent on research wasted.
  • In Adobe Acrobat with PDF files

  • Acrobat c1999 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Parsec ( 1702 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @03:16AM (#5018319) Homepage Journal

    Unless I'm missing something, the full version of Adobe Acrobat can do all that. Annotations in text, voice, file attachments, etc. and a file indexing service "Adobe Catalog". Any PostScript output can be turned into a PDF, there are even free tools to do this on Linux. But if you're using Macintosh or Windows, you can print directly to PDF format. Acrobat 5 can even render web pages into PDF format, preserving links. IIRC Adobe also has a fully functional time limited demo available.

    Now, getting those dead-tree file cabinets into PDF format is another problem alltogether. Possibly using overseas data-entry companies?

    Yep, head on over to www.adobe.com and research.

    • Acrobat Reader can.

      gv, ggv, and gsview cannot.

      Come to think of it, the Open Source world has seriously missed the ball in general when it comes to PDF documents. Open Source PDF viewers suck. In every single Open Source PDF viewer I've used, I've run into documents where the renderer has the orientation wrong -- and not just the orientation, but the "orientation of the bounding box" being different different from the "orientation of the drawn data on the bounding box", so that the top and bottom of the drawn data is lopped off, and there's a ton of white space to the left and right.

      The only Open Source PDF viewer I've used that can (gasp) search for text is gsview, and it's *really* flaky and doesn't highlight found text. Nothing like trying to read through a page of text to find the one word you're looking for.

      I've never used an Open Source PDF viewer that can antialias embedded bitmap images, which makes things look awful and unreadable.

      Finally, Acrobat Reader for Linux is completely awful, and leaks memory like a sieve. I have a friend with about a gig of RAM that Acrobat Reader sucked through in about six minutes of dragging and scrolling the document.

      Since PDF-viewing is one of the major office activities (along with world processing, and email), this is an enormous impediment to the use of Linux (or any UNIX) in a desktop environment.

      It's extremely embarrassing to say something nice about Linux, have a friend use it, and then realize how truly much Linux software sucks at handling PDFs. "You mean I have to read through this thing manually instead of searching?" "Why does this print turned sideways? It works fine on Windows!" "Why does this look so bad?"

      I predict Linux will not take off on the office desktop until (a) OpenOffice doesn't look and work completely differently from every app out there, and is free of cosmetic bugs *and* handles MS Office documents almost flawlessly, and (b) PDF viewing doesn't suck.

      And for home use, (c) until the Linux sound architecture doesn't completely suck. Right now, the only way to obtain software mixing is through a dropout-prone, non-real-time-scheduled sound server with lousy latency. They usually don't share the sound device very nicely, either. Many sound systems can't do hardware mixing. Linux doesn't have a single way to do software mixing fallback, where a user out of hardware channels will automatically do real-time-scheduled software mixing. Pretty lame. Oh, and at least esd has truly awful resampling. Usually, when new users come to Linux, I hear "why is my sound dropping out when it doesn't on Windows", "why is there lag between something happening and a sound playing", "why does my sound sound so bad (this when resampling is occurring", or "why can't I hear ICQ sounds when xmms is playing?"

      • xpdf? (Score:2, Informative)

        by yandros ( 38911 )

        Perhaps I am simply luckier, but I have never had xpdf get the bounding box wrong in either fashion you describe.

        Regardless of luck, I search for text in xpdf without trouble* at least several times a week, for months.

        Check it out, at freshmeat [freshmeat.net], for example.

        * by `without trouble', I don't count xpdf's nearly overbearing ugliness as `trouble'. :-)

        • Yep. Xpdf looks like arse but works really well. It's quick too.
        • After LaTeXing a document I just wrote, I searched for a word in a section header, just to test. xpdf didn't find it. I don't know what it does internally, but it's definitely flawed.

          OTOH, you are correct about the bounding box -- xpdf *did* correctly orient the bounding box, whereas gv, and ggv failed on the Linux Alpha Centauri manual that I just tested. :-) gsview worked on this one, though it fails on others. This is good. I haven't used xpdf for ages, though it's been sitting around on the system. Thanks at least for that much.

          I still can't search, though. :-(
      • You're missing a whole level of functionality then. xpdf searches for text, too. How is it you've missed this? Probably because you're impatient and callously toss something away instead of appreciating it for what it is.

        Also, esd makes mixing sound simple, and there already are drivers for mixing two streams of sound all over the drivers.

        How is it you've missed this functionality? Beats me. Maybe you were too busy whining about it on Slashdot.
        • You're missing a whole level of functionality then. xpdf searches for text, too. How is it you've missed this? Probably because you're impatient and callously toss something away instead of appreciating it for what it is.

          Just to make absolutely certain you're wrong, I *just* pulled out a copy of xpdf, LaTeXed a document, and searched for a word. It registers no hits.

          I'm not pulling this out of my ass. I've used a ton of ps/pdf viewers, wrote my current print filter, and do tons of ps and pdf processing each week. PDF support for Linux is bad. It's quite true. I use Linux (only Linux) as my desktop environment, and those of you that read my posts know that I'm a tremendous Linux fan. Doesn't change the fact that the PDF support sucks.

          Also, esd makes mixing sound simple, and there already are drivers for mixing two streams of sound all over the drivers.

          I'm not sure what you intended to say here, but you neatly avoided my complaints. (a) esd sound resampling quality and latency sucks, (b) there's no way to play sound and have the system opportunistically use hardware channels until it runs out and then use software fallback. I did, in fact, run out and purchas a SB Live just so that I could get multi-channel sound on Linux. Had I been using Windows, I could have made do with my older sound card and had exactly what I was looking for. This is not something to sneeze at, telling someone that they can "use a new operating system, but they have to buy new hardware to make up for a deficiency in the sound system".

          How is it you've missed this functionality? Beats me. Maybe you were too busy whining about it on Slashdot.

          I'm thinking the same thing, but about you not reading my question.
          • A common problem when it comes to searching PDFs is when they contain pictures of text rather than the text itself. Depending on how the PDF was generated, the document might look perfect to the human eye, but be very difficult for the reader program to manipulate as text. PDFs generated from LaTeX have proven difficult in this regard before, so beware of using them as your test metric!
          • Try using a document that has actual text instead of images, and stop whining about not being able to search through the text IN AN IMAGE. What, do you want the system to do a little OCR for you? Highlight the image where it thinks the words you're looking for are? Get your head out of the clouds.

            xpdf does have the ability to search through text, and if you can't find it or make effective use of it, that's really your problem then, isn't it?

            PDF support sucks because PDF sucks.

            Why do you expect others to write drivers for your existing hardware? And why do you whine when you didn't check to see whether your hardware was supported in the fashion you wanted before taking the Linux plunge?

            Sounds like someone convinced you to use Linux, you ran out and bought a copy (or invested a pile of time in it,) without doing some rudimentary research first. Your friend is at fault for being a zealot without considering his actions, and you are at fault for not looking into the matter a little more carefully.

            I apologize on behalf of the rest of us for your friend's over-enthusiasm. :-)

            Also, there already exist drivers that can mix sound together--but where do you want this to happen? In software? In hardware? Software solutions don't work so well because the streams may not match and may need to be resampled (a costly affair.) If you want support in the drivers you're using for the multi-channel hardware you might have (can SB Live play two completely different sample types at the same time?) then why not donate some hardware to someone who can do it or find some specs and write it yourself?

            But check the ALSA project:

            http://www.alsa-project.org ... where they list right on the front page they have support for multi-channel professional sound getups.

            I read your question just fine--you apparently have forgotten there's this thing called Google.
            • PDF support sucks because PDF sucks.

              I love this argument -- Foo sucks because Linux has poor support for it. Seen it tons of times.

              PDF isn't a closed standard, and the hard work is already done by ghostscript. PDF support sucks because Linux front ends suck compared to the Windows and Mac variants of Acrobat Reader.

              Why do you expect others to write drivers for your existing hardware? And why do you whine when you didn't check to see whether your hardware was supported in the fashion you wanted before taking the Linux plunge?

              I *have* drivers, you dolt. Read my message. I'm complaining about the lack of *any* support under Linux from falling back from hardware mixing to software mixing when you run out of channels -- your only option is to buy a card with so many channels that you'll never need more.

              Sounds like someone convinced you to use Linux, you ran out and bought a copy (or invested a pile of time in it,) without doing some rudimentary research first. Your friend is at fault for being a zealot without considering his actions, and you are at fault for not looking into the matter a little more carefully.

              I've been using Linux since the RH 5.x era, and exclusively as my desktop for years. I've used three different sound driver systems. I didn't just grab a copy off the shelf. Up until very recently, there was no free hardware mixing support at *all*, matter of fact.

              Also, there already exist drivers that can mix sound together--but where do you want this to happen? In software? In hardware?

              In hardware if the channels are available, otherwise fall back to software. Not that complicated.

              Software solutions don't work so well because the streams may not match and may need to be resampled (a costly affair.) If you want support in the drivers you're using for the multi-channel hardware you might have (can SB Live play two completely different sample types at the same time?) then why not donate some hardware to someone who can do it or find some specs and write it yourself?

              THE HARDWARE MIXING DRIVERS ARE WRITTEN! There is no *software fallback* support. And first of all, "write it yourself" is not feasible for *every* thing you lack (and I have added missing features to software on a number of occasions, thanks). The ALSA people have stated emphatically that they don't want to deal with software mixing, so they refuse to support this, and no one else has single device multi-channel (OSS/Linux calls this "multi-open") support.

              http://www.alsa-project.org ... where they list right on the front page they have support for multi-channel professional sound getups.

              It's *hardware mixing*.

              I read your question just fine--you apparently have forgotten there's this thing called Google.

              No, you misread it twice.
              • Sigh.

                Okay, let me be a little more patient with you, because you're going to a tremendous effort to write such long (and dorky) notes back:

                1. I never said PDF sucks because Linux has poor support for it. I said exactly the other way around: Linux has poor support for PDF because PDF sucks. BIG difference, and it's too bad you missed it.

                2. There are front-ends that don't "suck" other than xpdf. If you want the pretty graphics, and the cutesy hotkeys, and so on, then don't use xpdf. Personally I like the tiny footprint of xpdf. You obviously want something that looks like a Mac. Yay you.

                3. Did you not just say that you had to buy a new sound card because your previous one wasn't performing up to your standards in Linux? And who's the fucking dolt? You're the one bitching about Linux drivers like some kind of petulant child. Are you aware of the kind of CPU wastage that happens when disparate samples are mixed in software? Perhaps the reason there is no software fallback is that there's no clean way to ensure that the impact of such mixing doesn't kill the system? Hm? Software mixing doesn't belong in the driver, and you're the dolt for thinking it does.

                4. YOU were fucking whining about the lack of support for your older card: "I did, in fact, run out and purchas a SB Live just so that I could get multi-channel sound on Linux. Had I been using Windows, I could have made do with my older sound card and had exactly what I was looking for." So your older sound card didn't have enough channels for you? Jesus you're picky for someone using a free OS. And maybe there's a good reason why ALSA developers don't want to waste their time on software mixing?

                5. The original post I was replying to was PDF support. I notice you've conveniently cut this out of your own notes. Does that mean I was right about PDF support under Linux? That xpdf does search through text after all? Hm? Perhaps YOU are the one misleading yourself, here: After all, xpdf *DOES* have text-searching capabilities, and you don't appear to be capable of clicking the little binoculars button at the bottom of the screen...

                6. I love how you characterize the free software that you're enjoying that supports your multi-channel hardware as: "completely suck[s]". Oh, did you forget what you said? Here's a refresher: (Linux will not take off) "until the Linux sound architecture doesn't completely suck." What gratitude. What gratefulness. What willingness to volunteer to help.

                What fucking bullshit.

                You're just making an ass of yourself--give it up now before it's too late for redemption.
    • You might want to take a look at the excellent bibliography management software EndNote [endnote.com]. It has a lot of functionality that might serve as a foundation for what you want to accomplish.

  • in MS Word (Score:3, Funny)

    by elliotj ( 519297 ) <slashdot.elliotjohnson@com> on Sunday January 05, 2003 @03:17AM (#5018323) Homepage
    use "Track Changes"

    (oh crap! this is slashdot...wait a minute, don't use MS Word!)

    • Re:in MS Word (Score:3, Interesting)

      by coaxial ( 28297 )
      use "Track Changes"

      Oh god no! When I had a job (Don't worry, I didn't get laid off. I quit just before the implosion to go to gradschool.) I had write a design doc in Word. Track changes absolutly sucked. It couldn't merge two documents from a common ancestor at all. It said it did, but it couldn't. The only way you could get it to was to merge them one at a time.

      It was an experience I wouldn't want to repeat.
    • Track changes (or more accurately the "new comment" feature) does work very well in the Office XP incarnation of word. Unlike previous versions, the inserted note shows up on the side of the document just like a margin note, with a line pointing to the referenced text in the document. It does look like they were trying to emulate exactly the idea of margin notes.

      I have used this extensively when reading other people's documents and sending back suggestions. The only limitations I've seen vs. real margin notes is that you can't control the size of the font for the margin note (unless there is a way I'm not aware of)

      Here's a (not so great looking) screenshot [iupui.edu] of the comment feature in word.

      Also, look into the new beta OneNote [microsoft.com] from microsoft. I have note yet seen it, I just found it on the MS website while looking for a word comment screenshot. It looks like it's geared toward the TabletPC, but I can't tell from my brief reading if it can annotate existing documents or it's just a glorified notepad with its own file format.

  • It would be wonderful for some open source standard whereby meta-information could be overlaid on HTML such that document position (for 'anchoring' your commentary in the context you created) would allow you to keep your marked-up copy as such, it should automatically 'wrap' the appropriate citation info around any selected text, and then 'carry' that citation into it's appropriate location in your source doc.

    I've been a tech writer for years and entities from Sun to the local universities and utility companies all fail to implement systems of this sort for various reasons...often technical, more often political and financial.

    I do believe it's possible, whoever...
    • Sure, you could do it in XML. But you could just as easily do this in any other format as well, binary or text. XML doesn't lend anything special to this type of problem that any other format couldn't. I am guessing you're not consciously thinking that XML is some magic bullet, but people suggest it for things like it is. Yes, XML could applied in this situation, but it isn't going to make your job all that much easier than if you went with a format that you also already could parse with relative easy...

      BAH. I had written up a nice example of the format of such a document, using s-expressions ala Lisp. Which could very easily be translated to XML, one-for-one. However, Slashdot's silly lameness filter didn't like all the parens I used?

  • Annotea is the start of a solution (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mike_sucks ( 55259 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @04:11AM (#5018568) Homepage

    Annotea [w3.org] is a W3C project. To quote from the site:

    Annotea is a LEAD (Live Early Adoption and Demonstration) project enhancing the W3C collaboration environment with shared annotations.

    It provides annotation capabilities for HTML documents, and maybe XML documents, delivered in a web browser or similar UA.

    Anonzilla [mozdev.org] is a project for providing Annotea capabilities for Mozilla. Check it out!

    HTH
    /mike

    • Amaya (Score:2)

      by rafa ( 491 )

      Amaya [w3.org] has annotations buit in.

      While I'm not about to start using amaya to surf the web and post to /. - it's fun to play with things liek the annotations. They can be stored on a remote server and shared apparently, but I've not tried that yet. All in all - I think it looks just liek what the posted was asking for.

    • I just attached some annotations to the parent post, to demonstrate how it works. Check 'em out either with mozilla, or Anonzilla.
      • What was the URL you annotated? I can'r seem to see it..

        • hmm, I may have screwed that up. The annotated url is http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/05/04 58208 but the annotation is apparently attached to 'an unknown' portion of the document...

          Annotea apparently still has some rough edges, and I can't get Amaya to upload the annotations to the annotation server... *sigh*

        • Hmm, just uploaded another via Amaya (got that to work), but that also attached to an unknown section of the document. Strange.

          The Amaya one shows up in amaya in the proper location. both show up in the in the anonzilla toolbar, but as attached to an unknown section, but the Anonzilla aone created doesnt't show up in amaya.

          /me shakes his head and decides to leave it.

  • Margin Notes (Score:3, Funny)

    by Danse ( 1026 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @04:15AM (#5018591)

    Short answer: No

    Longer answer: Nope

    • Okay, I'm going to be offtopic here. It seems to me enough other people are coming up with solutions. And the above comment is rated funny?

      I'd like to get that one for metamoderation.

      • Yeah, but most of the suggested solutions are half-ass and/or unwieldy. Yeah, everyone knows you can insert little text boxes all over a PDF doc. It's still a pain and not very flexible. I stand by my comment :)

    • There can be no such program. I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.

  • Use Summation (Score:2, Informative)

    by abelaye ( 533580 )
    It's an app used primarily in the legal industry. You can in hard copies or import text/doc files. Once the file's been imported into the system, you can highlight bits of text and do the things that you need to do. Used it a lot when I was a legal assistant, mostly for summarizing deposition or trial transcripts.

    Check 'em out here at http://www.summation.com

    -- anthony

  • ...mosaic 1.0 and before?

  • Adobe Acrobat (Score:3, Informative)

    by rubinson ( 207525 ) <rubinson&email,arizona,edu> on Sunday January 05, 2003 @05:11AM (#5018743) Homepage
    It's definitely possible, as others have said, Adobe Acrobat already does this. I happen to own a copy of Acrobat, so I've had the opportunity to play around it's capabilities.

    Short answer -- it works pretty damn well. But not with a mouse. A mouse just isn't suited to making marginal notes (i.e., checking an important idea, underlining a particular phrase, or circling an important passage). A tablet device with a stylus, however - that holds promise.

    Other things to note: Acrobat provides two types of commenting systems. First, notations -- you can hilight, underline, circle, or freestyle directly onto the document. Second, "sticky-note" style comments. One very cool thing about the sticky-notes are that they render translucent so that you can still read the text underneath the note.

    Also, as far as I can tell, the commenting systems appear to be embedded into the document as PDF code. Specifically, gv is able to render notations (hilighting, underlines, etc). gv is not able to render the sticky-notes, however. I don't know if that's because gv simply can't handle the sticky-notes or because the sticky-notes are in some type of proprietary format. xpdf doesn't render either form of comments.

    So, if you're using Windows, are comfortable with proprietary software, and can afford $250, you're more or less set (assuming that pen computing lives up to its promise).

    Things get a bit more tricky if you're looking for free-software solutions. As far as I know, there's nothing out there as of yet. And I don't know how difficult it would be to implement (I do know that it's way beyond my capabilities, however). But because it appears that Acrobat embeds the comments as native PDF code, it should be possible. The question is whether or not anyone's willing to take up the cause...
  • is write on your screen with a dry erase marker, then wipe it off when you close the file. or maybe... use the highlighting tool in your editor of choice. (Most WISYWIG HTML Editors will allow you to highlight text in some fashion - bold,change text color, change background color)
  • There once was a plugin or tool you could download that allowed multiple people to annotate (more like put graffiti on) a web page.
    Other people with the same tool could then view the annotations.

    does this still exist?
  • CMU's AUIS (or whatever they took to calling the expanded Andrew Tool Kit stuff) included a tool very similar to this, ~10 years ago. Students could use a word-processor-like program to write papers (or import them from other sources), then submit them on-line to a central server. Teachers/TAs/whatnot could read, edit, and markup (that is, either change the document or annotate it) on-line, and share the results with other teacher/TA/whatnots and/or the students. It was a pretty useful idea, used for a couple MIT classes, but the implementation was pretty flawed (the server crashed often, and was prone to losing files), so they stopped.

    Come to think of it, that's pretty much the experience with AUIS/ATK in general. In significantly less-nice terms, a friend of mine once said:

    like all CMU code: way cool design, implementation like wet camel shit.

    At this point, I believe that AUIS is pretty much defunct, so I doubt anyone cares. The code is probably available under OSS license if anyone cares (I believe it was old-style BSD (with attribution)).
  • The name "HyperText Markup Langauge" implies the ability to markup HyperText, but it obviously doesn't. In order to accompish this in a sane and reasonable manner, you need the following components:
    • Local storage of the document you wish to mark up
    • A Uniform Resource Name for refering to said document, this URN must uniquely specify the document and not allow modifications (which would mangle or destroy the markup layers on top of it)
    • A markup language which used the URN and relative markups, thus allowing multiple layers of markup
    • A tool that understands and can write to all of the above
    I'd like to see this soon, but knowing the nature of the internet, open source, etc... I'm not going to hold my breath. If you want to work on it with me, that would be great. My email address should be obvious.

    Using Acrobat is not an option, real markup of things on the web needs to be the goal.

    You're not alone... I hope that's comforting.

    --Mike--

    • I don't mean to be a downer, but the W3c/IETF has had (in the past) various working groups working on/talking about this problem for quite a while. It turns out to be very complicated to do fully generally. You might benefit from some searches through the w3c mailing list archives.

      My impression is that the group discussion/design was complicated quite a lot by multiple divergent interests (i.e. live annotations or not, shared or not, modified copy versus reference the original, etc.). I think this may be an area where a small group of people can achieve better success by presenting a mostly-finished design to peer revue (rather than consensual group design).

      For my part, I think that such a system would be cool, but my practical needs would be met by a wiki that let you easily move forward/backwards among saved revisions, with some (optional?) way to view metadata about a change (who/when/what/why). CVS provides most of the tools (abstractly; I don't know that I would want to use CVS code).

      Good luck! I look forward to hearing about your project in the future...
  • Take the md5 hash of a selected piece of text - the text you want to annotate. Since most document formats support inline comments, you then put a "marker" in the comment, and the md5 hash. At the end of the document, in another comment, put the annotation with the hash of the annotated text.

    Then, all you need to do is search for the "markers" and match the md5 hash with the comment. If anyone fancies implementing this, give me a shout. I think it would be quite easy to do.
  • crit.org [crit.org] provides a free annotation service that you can use to add comments to any public web page. It doesn't provide indexing and searching capabilities, but you might find it interesting. You don't have to install any client software to create or view the annotations, and the owner of the target document doesn't have to install any server software to support annotations. You just go to crit.org and type in the URL of the page you want to visit.

    There's a short paper explaining this system at http://zesty.ca/crit/yee-crit-cscw2002-demo.pdf [zesty.ca].

  • Partial solution (Score:3, Informative)

    by uradu ( 10768 ) on Sunday January 05, 2003 @05:15PM (#5021247)
    For articles that you scan from the printed world and store as scanned images, I would recommend something like PaperPort Deluxe. In addition to offering nice folder-based scanned image management and editing, it also allows annotating these scans via virtual sticky notes, text boxes, free-form drawing and highlighting, etc. All these annotations are stored in a separate layer but can be permanently "burned" into the underlying raster image at any time. In addition it also offers background full-text indexing (after OCR-ing on the fly) and searching. It's quite space efficient with scans, especially when scanning at 300 dpi lineart (which is most useful for archiving printed articles, since they can be printed again at decent quality), with the average magazine article page taking up only about 30-40KB as a compressed TIFF image.

    Anyway, while it also lets you manage Word, Excel, PDF etc. files and web pages (and view them within its interface), unfortunately it won't let you annotate those. That would indeed be a very nice extra feature, maybe it should be suggested to ScanSoft. But still, scans of printed articles do make up a very substantial subset of research articles (my wife also does research and has to deal with this same issue), so PaperPort's features are still very useful. Plus it's a very inexpensive product, often included for free with $40 scanners.
  • Plenty of tools available now to do this, although not so many for the subset of software that most Slashdot readers use: open-source, written in C, and using fairly traditional and limited GUI toolkits.

    *sigh*

    As some have mentioned, you can do this with Adobe Acrobat. You can get it on Unix. And no, it is unfortuantely non-Free. Call me crazy, but in my moral scheme, I have a much higher importance on reducing the amount I waste than using the occasional hunk of proprietary (although free) software. Killing something that was alive comes before thet GPL. I know, I must be nuts.

    That said, I luckily do not have to use proprietary software for doing annotation. I have a little tool written in Squeak Smalltalk for annotating documents. Namely, I can annotate HTML, PostScript and PDF right now. You can add text (less storage space) or a drawing. There's even a handy little button where you can enable and disable the annotation marks.

    In PS and PDF, I cannot resave as a PS or PDF with the new layers, but I can save in a format I can later open up and read. I can also do a fresh export to GIF or PostScript (and could then use ps2pdf if I wanted to share as PDF).

    The app in question would run on any platform (Squeak is actually cross-platform- don't equate this with Java), except for the current version does some calls out to libraries in OS X, namely the AppKit. This isn't really absolutely necesary, with more work, it could be written to work with both the AppKit as well as GhostScript. Someone is making progress on a pure Squeak PDF renderer, so if that becomes even more usable soon, I could ditch the usage of Mac OS X's class library and just use that...

    It can also annotate a "stack" of images (PNG, JPG, GIF), but you don't often come by documents in such way. However, it was super easy to add, so I did- and there are some docs I've come across in this format, e.g., a bunch of books where each page is a .GIF, found on pre-PDF ubiquity on some old ZIP disks of mine.

    And yes, this tool is completely open source and Free. I don't have it online for download, but it was such an easy thing to write, I assumed it was not something hard to come by. If people are interested, I could prepare it for such distribution...

    For the PDA...
    Also, the Newton can do it. Every eBook reader on the Newton I've used (PaperBack and Newt's Cape) can do annotation. Just tap the annotation button, and it interprets what you write as a drawing to annotate. To my knowledge, neither let you do pure text annotation, which would be nice I guess- but it 's better than nothing!

  • ok, first of all - I'm not all that familiar with this - but here goes anyway. there is a W3 project called Annotea [w3.org] It is implemented in Amaya as annotations, which apparnelty can be stored on a remote server. It uses this RDF annotation schema [w3.org] and stored on a remote annotation server (the annotation server howto [w3.org])

    When you have created an annotation for a piece of text, there is a pencil icon next to it. Click it and the annotation appears as a popup. It appears to be a very nice concept - but I've not used it much. I assume that teh annotations could be presented inline in the document.

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