Keypoints, a plain-text focussed note-taking & PDF annotation app for the Mac

[msteffens]

@anon41602260, I’d like to continue a conversation from another thread here:

@anon41602260

Please make zettel-anything entirely optional and configurable.

Keypoints isn’t a typical Zettelkasten program, but it shares quite a few principles with it. For example, each note has a stable & concise ID, which is also used for cross-linking of notes. But you can create links easily via drag & drop. This is also shown quickly in this little screencast:

@anon41602260

@msteffens

This means one should be able to easily see the context of one’s note. I.e., easily jump to the quoted text in the PDF source, and back again. Also, always keep the reference info in the note. Ideally, the reference info would be extracted automatically.

Ambitious and difficult, so how you pull this off will be interesting.

By “Ambitious and difficult”, are you referring to the reference retrieval? My app will try to fetch the reference info from your reference manager (if possible). There’s still a lot of work to do w.r.t. bibliographic features, but I hope to support at least the scriptable reference managers on the Mac (like Papers, Bookends or BibDesk) from the very beginning.

@anon41602260

I am not sure how you can accomplish plain text portability (assuming it is based on some commonly used markdown library) at the same time as accomplishing the two requirements I quoted above. This would indeed be very useful.

Since the plaintext note contains all required information Keypoints can re-establish the link to the exact PDF annotation (in the PDF source file) from the plaintext note. But it currently doesn’t provide PDF links that will open the PDF (at the exact location) in other applications. This would require those other apps to support linking to an exact position on the PDF page. Or did you mean something else?

@anon41602260

I mentioned my own, perhaps niche, use case of needing to have a set of notes that cover multiple PDF documents (many to many) – which MarginNote does quite nicely, and LiquidText somewhat less well. Looking forward to seeing how to accomplish this sort of meshing with your solution.

Are you referring to the fact that notes from different PDF sources can be displayed in these apps next to each other? This would be similar in Keypoints. Or did you mean something else? Thanks.