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Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

desklamp.io

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Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

#41

Post by dotancohen »

pj747 wrote: post #38
Brajeshwar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When in doubt, do something like this -- $99.99 a year (or something higher than you are thinking right now) BUT free during the beta. So, people will either stay because they can afford that or is worth it or will leave. So, you end up with users who you will likely care enough to make good features for them.

Yup. By the next show HN, I'll be sure to come back with more clarity on this front. This is a solid idea. Allows us to focus on power users.

  > Allows us to focus on power users.
I'm extraordinarily wary of relying on non-open-source software. But when I see that you are focusing on power users, that does arouse my interest - that's why I continue to pay for Jetbrains even though VIM is fee.

But if I leave Jetbrains I can still work on my projects with VIM. If I leave Desklamp, how can I continue to view my notes? Do third party PDF readers, e.g. Okular, support whatever annotation format you are using?

I need an exit strategy if the company goes belly up, or I am unable to pay my bills, or QT N+1 is incompatible with my Foobar, or I don't upgrade, or the US sanctions my country, or DNS is blocked after reinstalling the OS, or exploits are not resolved in Desklamp, etc etc.

Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

#42

Post by dotancohen »

dimal wrote: post #21

This looks great! I've been bouncing between PDF readers that supposedly deal with highlighting well, and most of them are terrible. Is it possible to export highlights and notes as Markdown? That would let me dump my notes into Obsidian.

Okular used to store annotations in an XML "sidecar" file, though it now stores the annotations in the PDF itself. However there may still be a sidecar file option, or perhaps the annotations are still in XML in the PDF itself. You might want to take a look at that.

Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

#43

Post by lf-non »

dimal wrote: post #21

This looks great! I've been bouncing between PDF readers that supposedly deal with highlighting well, and most of them are terrible. Is it possible to export highlights and notes as Markdown? That would let me dump my notes into Obsidian.

You should look at logseq [1]. It is primarily an outliner but has a good integrated PDF reader with highlighting & annotation support. Content is saved as markdown.

It has pretty much replaced other note taking tools for me, but I know of people who use it in conjunction with Obsidian/Zettlr/Zotero.

[1] https://logseq.com/

Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

#44

Post by elashri »

dotancohen wrote: post #41
pj747 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. By the next show HN, I'll be sure to come back with more clarity on this front. This is a solid idea. Allows us to focus on power users.

> Allows us to focus on power users. I'm extraordinarily wary of relying on non-open-source software. But when I see that you are focusing on power users, that does arouse my interest - that's why I continue to pay for Jetbrains even though VIM is fee. But if I leave Jetbrains I can still work on my projects with VIM. If I leave Desklamp, how can I continue to view my notes? Do third party PDF readers, e.g. Okular, s…

I would argue that vim and its ecosystem is the one targeting power users while Jetbrains products are more open for users. Just look how much freedom you have to customize vim vs any IDE.

Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

#46

Post by vasvir »

Looks a lot like Hypothesis https://web.hypothes.is/ which is not only for PDF but also for any web page with a url.

Apparently the whole annotation thing is a W3C standard https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standar... but you know how these things go...

Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

#47

Post by kobiguru »

I don't have any feedback I just love the design and work flow. I downloaded to software. Overall I can see myself moving into this workflow but my only big concern is the exit clause and the login screen when I start the app (maybe have a file browser -it might be my adobe reader hangover) , I could not figure out how to export the notes, maybe you will work. Overall my reservations are just nitpicking and I absolutely love the product. Great work.

Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

#48

Post by zeagle »

Neat idea. You may have addressed this but one suggesting is allowing to creating a scalable canvas (at least vertically) and annotating that blank slate. The only software I know that does this well (with robust search) is onenote.

I am not sure if it is something specific to comp sci/engineering but most of the note taking apps have a similar focus on taking source material, pretty figures and equations, and then annotating it. Maybe it is undergraduate level nitpicking where every minutiae might be tested. This mirrors old paper-based annotating and highlighting a textbook, but not note taking which aims to summarize. I think the right panel partly addresses this which is great.

I switched to digital note taking towards the end of my first degree so maybe I’m a fossil, but my then digital approach on the life sciences/medicine side has always been the opposite: take screenshots of the important content, paste them into a note taking app (e.g. onenote), and annotate or re-organize that. That cuts down the amount of notes to sift through and then review by at least an order of magnitude, if only thorugh eliminating duplication and whitespace. Years out I still do this for my CME and during meetings.

Re: Show HN: Desklamp – convenient and collaborative notemaking on PDFs

#49

Post by pbhjpbhj »

pj747 wrote: post #35
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #12

I'd like to be able to take notes for a PDF where the note part can handle the PDF being updated and would link the notes to a numbered section (or a title, optionally) in the PDF. Any chance this does that, or any other suggestions?

Note making connected to PDFs is abysmal. As far as I know, we're one of the better tools out there. Updating PDFs is a challenge for sure. Constantly updating content is probably better suited for a wiki/notion page though. I'm curious - what kind of PDFs are you dealing with?

It's a mixture of legislative and technical documentation.

Currently I copy to OneNote but there's no linking then to see updates to the original docs within my notes.

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