Formatting annotation extractions: feature request

[Dellu]

Please excuse me if this is already discussed or covered.
I am a bit late to the party on annotation extraction and many other new features in Be. I havn't been following the progresses for while.

But, anyways, I want is the markdown extraction to have a formatting similar to what we have in the Highlights app.

> Highlighted annotations come under quotations like this
> Underlined annotations come in bold. ; still within quotations

(pdf) Notes/comments come out as regular texts.

This might sound a simple copying of the features of another app. It is actually very practical choice to avoid confusions of one's own (the user, reader) Confusing one's one note (comment with the highlighted texts could lead a dangerous problem of plagiarism. BE can help us avoid plagiarism by clearly differentiating annotations (author's texts) from our own (reader's) comments and notes.

Here is an example of an annotation of a page inside the Highlights app. The markdown appears in preview mode.



Also notice that the page number is with the hyperlink.

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#### [Page 6](highlights://Baker2014@b%20Rethinking%20Amharic%20prepositions%20as%20case%20markers%20inserted%20at%20PF#page=6) ####

That is minimalistic and very effective.

In the styled text, the colors clearly differentiate the annotation from the comment. Nothing further need to be done.

[DrJJWMac]

I see how the use of different markdown formatting can improve the ease in recognizing the source format for an annotation extracted from a PDF. The different types of annotations in a PDF are

* highlight
* underline
* PDF note
* comment

The different types of (BE) notes (stored as notecards) are

* note
* quote

Each of these can have a unique color.

I imagine here is where we must leave to Jon to comment whether and how he may want to make changes to the markdown export to support all the variations, let alone also the color. For example, since markdown defaults to HTML for cases that it otherwise does not cover, colors for highlighted text could be covered with this style

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<span style="color: red;">Here is some text from the reference that is highlighted in red.</span>

I have one note with regard to your statement about keeping track of the authorship of annotations and notes. You can now set the author for the markups in BE. Choose the Gear Icon in the annotation window and look for the menu option Annotation Author. You can set the author in the iPad version as well. I find this useful to distinguish between when I use BE (author: jjw BE) versus PDFExpert (author: jjw PDFE).

[Jon]

As DrJJWMac pointed out, Bookends will display the various authors if you like. Moreover, if you choose to output the modified dates you also have information about the annotation type (e.g. XYX — Written Jun 14, 2020, or ABC — Highlighted Jun 15), which distinguishes between PDF text and your (or other author's) comments.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Dellu]

Thank you for the information guys. I didn't notice that the author information can be displayed.
That is helpful.