Gathering text selections in the notes field

[aechallu]

I wonder if other users would find this useful. I regularly use BE to keep notes on bibliographies. While many times I just take notes on the books, many others I copy-paste excerpts from the pdf or references from my papers or other people's publications.

What I'd like BE is to facilitate the gathering of information by pasting a text selection into the reference's note field without having to copy in one application, move to the other, paste, and switch back to the other application. I think this functionality can be added through the service menu (with a system-wide shortcut?), or maybe as right-click options on the dock icon.

I'd like to add this service in particular: "Append selection to notes": When done in any text window, this would just copy the text selection, and paste it at the end of the notes field in BE. THis would be useful when reading PDFs, or when looking at word processor documents to mine comments I wrote some time ago about a specific text. An even better version would be to do this with a Quicksilver plugin.

A more far-fetched proposal is to have a sort of tiny scratch pad that can be set to float on top (a la Scrivener). The user can then drag everything into the scratch pad, and when it's done, there could be a submit button to append the contents of the pad into the reference. The submit button could even have a drop-down menu next to it to allow the user to choose a reference -- that would be a great topic for forum discussion...

Thanks for listening!
(And thanks for listening, filtering & implementing, Jon!)

[Jon]

Those are interesting ideas. I'd like to see a discussion of this (and other ideas) as well.

Jon
Sonny Software

[hrashid]

I must confess I like using several specialized tools, so I'm not sure how useful this function would be to me.

I collect my notes in CircusPonies Notebook because it allows me tag my clippings and notes. I find I can see relationships better this way.

I like that BE stores my references, any files with those references, and allows me to tag (keyword) at a higher level than my notes.

[AsafKeller]

I wholeheartedly support the request to have a shortcut (or a contextual menu) to directly import into BE's notes field. An option to import as either txt or rtf would be nice, too. I am hoping to be able to use BE as the primary tool in my workflow, and this option will make this process much more fluid. Integration with Skim's notes would also be useful; the ability to read, index and search the notes Skim bundles in its propriety format would be very useful, as it would allow annotating the PDF file, without the need to import notes to BE.

While on the subject: the search field in BE does not allow simultanoues search of the attachment ("spotlight search") and the records. Could we have an option to search both simultaneously?

Thanks.

[Jon]

While on the subject: the search field in BE does not allow simultanoues search of the attachment ("spotlight search") and the records. Could we have an option to search both simultaneously?

You can do this with the Find (Command-F) function.

Jon
Sonny Software

[AsafKeller]

Thanks, I didn't see this (deleted my premature, earlier response).