Page 1 of 1

Extracting quotes and annotations

Posted: Thu Jul 04, 2024 3:45 pm
by swmartin1960
First of all, Bookends is FANTASTIC. I've used it for nearly ten years and I'm still discovering great features -- most recently the ability to extract highlights (quotes) and annotations with a keystroke.

If I could dream -- or maybe there's a way to do this already -- it would be great if
1. there was a way to specify highlights (quotes) by wrapping quotation marks around the extracted text.
2. there was a way to put references into the outputted text rather than just page numbers.

Let me illustrate:

Right now, this is what I get with Command-E:
p.61  space in South Africa has been fed by colonial ontology

What I'd love is:
{Mlambo, 2024, #301933@61}  “space in South Africa has been fed by colonial ontology”

or even better
“space in South Africa has been fed by colonial ontology” {Mlambo, 2024, #301933@61}

It might be possible to do this myself with a script in Obsidian, though I'm not good with scripts.

Thanks for all your work!
Steve Martin.

Re: Extracting quotes and annotations

Posted: Thu Jul 04, 2024 3:49 pm
by swmartin1960
Apologies: I just saw a post about number 2 (putting in citations).

Re: Extracting quotes and annotations

Posted: Thu Jul 04, 2024 4:52 pm
by Jon
Thank you.

For #1 you mean that Bookends would automatically surround highlighted and underlined (I assume) text with quote marks? As in "I highlighted this text"? It's certainly possible, but I wouldn't be surprised if others didn't want that. And we already have a lot of settings that one can apply to this feature, I don't think adding more small settings to tweak the output will be helpful (and no doubt someone will ask for an option for smart vs straight quote marks, or single quote marks, etc., there is no end). It's not hard to add them post-extraction.

Jon
Sonny Software