Re: OT: Annotating PDF & Org

[Ramon Diaz-Uriarte <rdiaz02@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 6 May 2013 08:39:07 -0500,Russell Adams <RLAdams@AdamsInfoServ.Com> wrote:
> Given the emacs and Org oriented nature of this group, I'd like to
> know if anyone has found a good Orgish (ie: portable, text, etc) to
> annotate PDFs?

> Features would be items like highlighting blocks, adding notes
> (margins or "sticky" notes), and saving to either a sidecar file in a
> text format (ala Org) or directly appending the PDF.


I am not sure this will be of much help since the annotations, etc, are
not originally saved in a sidecar file but this is basically what I do:

- Annotate/highlight the PDF, keeping the annotations in the PDF itself
  (when on the computer I use Okular, and "Save As"; if in the tablet, I
  use ezPDF or similar). I emphasize this: the annotations are in the PDF
  itself (i.e., if you open the PDF with evince, acrobat reader, whatever,
  you'll see them there).

- Extract the annotations from my complete collection of PDFs (nightly
  cron job), storing all of them in an org file, with a link to the
  PDF. (I do the extraction with Leela
  ---https://github.com/TrilbyWhite/Leela---, which I find is more
  reliable than poppler-based approaches, such as that in recoll).


So the orgish part is just the second one, but it works for me: I can
search all of my annotations and jump directly to the PDF, from a single
org file from within Emacs.

Highlights? Nope, it does not work as Leela does not extract them and I
could not find another tool to do it automagically. Recoll will extract
all text from PDFs (not the annotations, though), so I can search for
specific text on my complete PDF collection using recoll. But that ain't
orgish at all ;-) and it is decoupled from the previous approach.



A few more details, and some ugly R code that I use to do this are
available here: http://ligarto.org/rdiaz/Zotero-Mendeley-Tablet.html#sec-9


Best,


R.


> Thanks.

> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Russell Adams                            RLAdams@AdamsInfoServ.com

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-- 
Ramon Diaz-Uriarte
Department of Biochemistry, Lab B-25
Facultad de Medicina 
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid 
Arzobispo Morcillo, 4
28029 Madrid
Spain

Phone: +34-91-497-2412

Email: rdiaz02@gmail.com
       ramon.diaz@iib.uam.es

http://ligarto.org/rdiaz