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General brainstorming for Note-taking software
Nod5:
Armando,
"If I could find another reliable strategy which is sufficiently portable (I don't want to loose years of tags and annotation by just changing software or OS), I'd give it a try..."
Well you could do what I do with journal articles but for any other types of files also. That is, create a .txt file with the same name as the file you want tagged (but perhaps with "_tag" at the end) and put the tags and keywords in that .txt. I think any indexing search tool will find those tags and due to the same filename you then find the file you're searching for. If you have a consistent and unique format for your current tags in filenames that a script can isolate (like using [tag1 tag2 tag3] only for tags) then you could probably make a batch script that migrates to the ".txt system".
Darwin:
Armando,
"If I could find another reliable strategy which is sufficiently portable (I don't want to loose years of tags and annotation by just changing software or OS), I'd give it a try..."
Well you could do what I do with journal articles but for any other types of files also. That is, create a .txt file with the same name as the file you want tagged (but perhaps with "_tag" at the end) and put the tags and keywords in that .txt. I think any indexing search tool will find those tags and due to the same filename you then find the file you're searching for. If you have a consistent and unique format for your current tags in filenames that a script can isolate (like using [tag1 tag2 tag3] only for tags) then you could probably make a batch script that migrates to the ".txt system".
-Nod5 (June 12, 2007, 02:23 PM)
--- End quote ---
Just to note - this is possible with Endnote (pretty much any version) - you create your bibliographic entry, link to the pdf (either to its location your harddrive or you can have it copy the pdf to an Endnote managed location within the Endnote library you're importing into), and type out an abstract, keywords, notes, etc. into the bibliographic entry. It's all now searchable and linked within Endnote. As I mentioned before, this solution only works if you and anyone you want to share the notes with have Endnote installed...
Armando:
That is, create a .txt file with the same name as the file you want tagged (but perhaps with "_tag" at the end) and put the tags and keywords in that .txt. I think any indexing search tool will find those tags and due to the same filename you then find the file you're searching for. If you have a consistent and unique format for your current tags in filenames that a script can isolate (like using [tag1 tag2 tag3] only for tags) then you could probably make a batch script that migrates to the ".txt system".
-Nod5 (June 12, 2007, 02:23 PM)
--- End quote ---
It definitively is an interesting strategy.
I use a similar one for all the software I download & for some archives – and to help me be consistent, I now use a simple shell extension that was recommended by at least 2 different people here : it allows me to create *.TXT notes on the fly when right clicking on a file ( http://www.moonsoftware.com/freeware.asp : look for FileNote).
I’ve tried to do that for files also in the past and I disliked the fact that every single file was doubled : always had to make sure that I moved both files when I had to move them around, had to check both files when I renamed them, etc. I guess it’s not as bad as it sounds, but these little irritants stopped me from using this technique. Maybe there could be a way of doing it in a way that’s much more simple and automated. But… I haven’t thought about it.
Maybe you (or others) would have suggestions?
[edit : forgot to add an answer to Darwin's suggestion!]
@ Darwin :
I use Endnote too, but I never wanted to use its "linking" function for notes since there are so many documents that I just don't want in EndNote but that I still want to tag, write notes in, etc. So it made it a bit complicated to have notes in different places : EndNote + the documents themselves + whatever... I still use it a bit though, but not to link notes or comments. Do you use that strategy a lot?
superboyac:
Wow, you guys are hardcore.
urlwolf:
for me, linking pdfs to endnote is not worth it. Lots of hand-linking.
I just use locate to find the pdf I need. The filenames must be meaningful though.
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