Are Digital "Margin Notes" Possible Yet?

Stavo asks: "I'm looking for a robust, reliable personal knowledge management solution. As a professional researcher, I read a lot of text-based content. I prefer to mark up content, by underlining or adding margin notes. I also need to retrieve and search content. The low tech solution is printing the text and using a pen to mark up, then filing the papers. If I want to quote a source, I have to type the quote. With the advent of Tablet PCs and similar tech, I'd like to find a way to keep the content digital. In other words, if I download an journal article in PDF or HTML, how can I mark it up, save it, and later search/retrieve it? Shouldn't computers provide a better solution than voluminous file cabinets filled with dead trees?"

Comments

Acrobat c1999

[Parsec]

Unless I'm missing something, the full version of Adobe Acrobat can do all that. Annotations in text, voice, file attachments, etc. and a file indexing service "Adobe Catalog". Any PostScript output can be turned into a PDF, there are even free tools to do this on Linux. But if you're using Macintosh or Windows, you can print directly to PDF format. Acrobat 5 can even render web pages into PDF format, preserving links. IIRC Adobe also has a fully functional time limited demo available.

Now, getting those dead-tree file cabinets into PDF format is another problem alltogether. Possibly using overseas data-entry companies?

Yep, head on over to www.adobe.com and research.

Annotea is the start of a solution

[mike_sucks]

Annotea is a W3C project. To quote from the site:

Annotea is a LEAD (Live Early Adoption and Demonstration) project enhancing the W3C collaboration environment with shared annotations.

It provides annotation capabilities for HTML documents, and maybe XML documents, delivered in a web browser or similar UA.

Anonzilla is a project for providing Annotea capabilities for Mozilla. Check it out!

HTH
/mike