Some questions about note-taking

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tarot sport
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Joined: Sun Jan 24, 2021 11:44 am

Some questions about note-taking

Post by tarot sport »

I find Bookends not only an excellent ref manager but also equally good at taking notes on texts. However, there is something I am missing in how some things work.

If in addition to highlighting I wanted to take textual notes, as if it were a text file, I guess I would have to use the "Notes" item in the right panel and simply start writing. Does this file "exist" anywhere? Can I move it to my drive or does it remain internal to the Bookends item? Using DevonThink I would like to index them.
But if this is pretty understandable to me, where I have difficulty figuring it out is the Notecards thing. What is their most appropriate use and best practices? I have noticed that by creating a notecard the whole "notes" section structures itself as notecards. I then saw that it is possible to create notecards with "#" headers, which I imagined supported writing in markdown but it doesn't seem to.

I then ask all users how you usually manage your annotation workflow. Thank you.
Jon
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Re: Some questions about note-taking

Post by Jon »

I'll start, but others please chime in.

If you want to take notes that belong to the PDF, create a Note annotation (pop-up Action menu). If you want to take notes that belong to the database (Bookends) create a new notecard. Notecards are virtual fields. That is, they are created from the database Notes field. Two return characters in a row define what is in each notecard. The data is not stored in a text file, it's in the database. Of course you can save it to a text file if you want.

Please refer to the user guide (Help menu), which covers PDF annotations and notecards in detail. There is also this video tutorial, which is dated but should still help.

https://www.sonnysoftware.com/resources ... torial.mov

Jon
Sonny Software
DrJJWMac
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Re: Some questions about note-taking

Post by DrJJWMac »

With regard to your comment on using markdown in notes or notecards, I have found that the only "markdown-like" syntax that is recognized for viewing notes or notecards within BE is the #text or # text to indicate a header. Note that the first option without a space between # and text was once acceptable but is no longer recommended as being markdown compliant for header syntax.

https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax/

In addition, a TAG in BE is %tag, where a TAG in Obsidian (and Curio and perhaps others) is #tag. The #tag markdown syntax is not recognized in BE. It can however be processed in Devonthink (DT) with convert hashtag to tag operations, so that DT adds the #tag to its own tag cloud. Perhaps someone on the Devonthink forum has given a way to convert %tag (e.g. in notes from BE) to cloud tags in DT (I am interested in this as well).
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JJW
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