Note taking workflow article

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Posted by JasonE
Nov 28, 2012 at 05:17 PM

http://drosophiliac.com/2012/09/an-academic-notetaking-workflow.html

Besides the above, this blog has lots of posts of interest to this forum.

Jason

Jason Ebaugh
Contact: jasonebaugh@jasonebaugh.info
Blog: http://www.jasonebaugh.info
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonebaugh

Posted by Dr Andus
Nov 28, 2012 at 06:45 PM

JasonE wrote:
http://drosophiliac.com/2012/09/an-academic-notetaking-workflow.html

Thanks for that. Interesting system. I use a very similar workflow on the PC. Instead of iAnnotate PDF I use GoodReader and PDF Expert on the iPad, and on the PC I use EndNote instead of Papers, PDF XChange Viewer instead of Skim, and ConnectedText instead of VoodooPad.

The main difference is that my system is more text-based (as opposed to colour) initially, as I use GoodReader/PDF Expert’s highlight and comment extraction tools (which I find better that those of iAnnotate) to email myself the notes, which go into CT, and there I use colours to annotate the reading notes further.

By extracting the text this way there is less of a need to link to specific PDF pages, as all the key text is in the wiki already. But I still include a link to the PDF itself.

BTW, I didn’t realise there is a Windows version of Papers: http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/

Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 30, 2012 at 08:42 AM

Great tip on Papers - I’ve been looking at “research manager” apps, and this looks very promising. But then again, PDFs are quite good at managing themselves: not many people realise that the basic Acrobat Reader has a powerful search engine built into it - the Binoculars on the navigation bar - that can search through folders/subfolders of PDF files and list all the hits in every file, with extracts and highlighting, in a matter of seconds. One of the great unsung features of Reader. Combine that with a cheap but competent PDF editor like PDF-Xchange Viewer (which I thoroughly endorse) and you can turn your own filesystem into a very efficient equivalent to something like Mendeley. If you load it all up in Dropbox, you can even sync it with your iPad/Android device…

Cheers,
Bill

Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 30, 2012 at 08:48 AM

On the subject of PDFs - and, I will admit, diversifying even further from the main topic of this forum, albeit in the interests of a secondary topic (information management) that also interests many of us - I have just discovered the linguist’s friend: PDF Split and Merge (PDF SAM), a free program that is capable of taking two PDFs and interleaving the pages to create a new PDF that is a combination of both. Very fast (sub 3 secs to do a 20-page doc).

So what? I hear you cry.

So for us linguists, this means we can create “bitexts” (dual-language texts) out of different language versions of e.g. complex brochures in PDF format. The alternative is to extract and arrange the text somehow, but that can take hours. Using the PDF interleaving method, you can create a PDF consisting of page 1 SL, page 1 TL, page 2 SL, page 2 TL, page 3 SL, page 3 TL etc. etc. (SL = Source Language, TL = Target Language), then use Acrobat Reader’s rather nice side-by-side view to see the language versions… well, side by side. Combined with Acrobat Reader’s search engine, this gives you a very powerful bitext management capability that costs absolutely nothing, and obviates messing about extracting and reformatting text from PDFs!

Good, eh!

Cheers,
Bill

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