I've tried a few document management solutions, but I can't get past the fact that annotating documents by hand is so much more satisfying, I can't angrily scribble or circle text when they're digital!
On iPad (and probably Surface) you can!
Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
51–60 of 112 posts
Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
#52This would be neater as a self hosted system. I have a haphazard way of managing notes and docs that has too much overhead. I would like a squirrel program to store and retrieve more easily and will eventually just write one. I think we need more tools that rely on self-hosting cheap nodes for data where the owner has complete control. Knowledge management systems are really personal and if third parties go away then…
I'm using gitea to self-host, works well for markdowns and code, but bad for anything that is binary(pdf,media files,etc), because of git, which really does not fit for binaries, and git-lfs is a PITA to use still
I do the same. I have a gitea instance and all my text saved in markdown in there. I also enabled full-text search so I can find it again. On mobile (iOS) I use working copy as a git client, which handles all files just fine (and also supports git-lfs).
Most of the time I want to attach binary files to notes, so I thought about using a sync solution like NextCloud or FileRun (with syncthing) and just link to my files.
Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
#53I started use evernote for this, but it dawned of me after a while that if evernote went down, all my data, diaries, notes etc etc was to be locked in and I have to start over. Therefore I'm using org-mode, its just a UTF8 encoded file, even if org-mode disappeared over night, I can still read the data.
This is why Polar is OSS ... you won't have this issue with Polar just like you wouldn't with org-mode.
I like Emacs too and have written literall hundreds of thousands of lines of elisp (seriously)...
I'm trying to make Polar usable for everyone not just Emacs users.
Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
#54This would be neater as a self hosted system. I have a haphazard way of managing notes and docs that has too much overhead. I would like a squirrel program to store and retrieve more easily and will eventually just write one. I think we need more tools that rely on self-hosting cheap nodes for data where the owner has complete control. Knowledge management systems are really personal and if third parties go away then…
Inspired by the work of the famous psychologist Endel Tulving (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endel_Tulving), I have come up with a simple technique that works for me. I simply keep two text files called "Episodic" and "Semantic" in Dropbox corresponding to the two major forms of human memory. Episodic memory is associated with specific episodes while Semantic memory is simply facts that we have accumulated throughout our lives (not associated with specific incidents). I use episodic memory to record various events in my life and periodically move information from there to the semantic memory. This sounds low-tech (and it is) but it works well for me.
I'm sure more sophisticated tools could be created around this concept.
Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
#55You can already reopen PDFs where you left them in Adobe Reader :
Edit > Accessibility > Setup Assistant > Set all accessibility options > Next > Next > Next > Next > Reopen documents to the last viewed page
or
Edit > Preferences > Documents > Restore last view settings when reopening documents
Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
#56AFAICT, this is for PDF files on your computer and websites converted to PDF. There's no option to add, say, markdown files or locally stored email files. Don't get me wrong, I've tried it out and it's awesome. I'm just not seeing how it's going to take off as a knowledge repository with its limitations. The last thing I want is yet another place I have to look for my files, and I sure don't want to have to keep thin…
> AFAICT, this is for PDF files on your computer and websites converted to PDF. There's no option to add, say, markdown files or locally stored email files.
Key point of order.
We don't actually convert the websites to PDF. We cache the pages offline so you have the original in your archive.
This is massively cool and I need to do a better job of making it clear that this isn't just conversion to PDF.
> Don't get me wrong, I've tried it out and it's awesome. I'm just not seeing how it's going to take off as a knowledge repository with its limitations.
You mean specific limitations to Polar?
> I'm also concerned with the ability of this thing to scale. There doesn't appear to be any system for grouping items other than tagging. Maybe tagging works for others, but it's not something I trust (if I have hundreds of items and missed a tag, the item is lost).
Some users want to have more of a hierarchical folder view and we might implement that.
But I don't get your point about a missing tag.
> Definitely don't want this to be a negative comment. It's more "you're 95% of the way to an outstanding product, but I think the last 5% might be an obstacle to adoption."
Well one thing is that I think the Hacker News crowd is very very very picky in terms of features and functionality vs the normal user base.
The features I've seen from HN just aren't going to be necessary for all users. I'm fine adding them if they fit into the roadmap but some just won't be implemented.
One issue is the ability to use other cloud providers which has been brought up a number of times (which is why I wrote this post).
That's a massively complex feature and while that would be cool in some sense it would just be far far far too expensive to implement.
I think the remaining 5% is doable but we will see..
One valid criticism is that PDF is the only format. We're working on markdown and ePub too...
Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
#57I like the idea and was using this for months, but finally gave up, document viewer (or however this pdf.js thing is called in english) lags every time I scroll and it's too annoying. Also overlays for selecting progress are messing with highlighting and re-reading. It could be showed instead simply as rectangle with borders, without this blue background, if that's possible and if not there should be other way to man…
> the document viewer ... lags every time I scroll and it's too annoying. Also
Even if you scroll down like 5px or if you scrolled multiple pages at once?
How long was the lag?
> overlays for selecting progress are messing with highlighting and re-reading. It could be showed instead simply as rectangle with borders, without this blue background, if that's possible and if not there should be other way to manage progress.
Yes.. I'm planning on evolving this a bit. I didn't realize that people would be so annoyed by this and it isn't part of my normal usage.
I read forward and the pagemarks lag behind my reading and highlights.
I think I can implement a feature to poke through the pagemark to be able to annotate through it.
Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
#58I started keeping favorite quotes in Hypercard back in 1987. I didn't pay attention when Hypercard went extinct 15 years later, and failed to do the work to extract the data. Now I keep info in text files and grep is my friend. No spaced repetition, but tags go in as grep-able raw text too. Will Polar, or Evernote, or any other system, be around in 30 years?
> Will Polar, or Evernote, or any other system, be around in 30 years?
Yes.. that's literally why I called it Polar.
It's designed to be a permanent vault for your data. This is why it's Open Source.
Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
#59Can I easily use this to replace zotero, jabref, mendeley etc for citation management?
Still working on that part. I think I'm going to allow association of a DOI then lookup the full metadata and then allow you to copy the metadata in a citation format to the clipboard.
Would that give you 80% of what you want?
I did some analysis and 40-60% of PDFs have the DOIs embedded.
Re: Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository
#60I liked the idea but couldn't quite get the anki workflow running smoothly. To be fair I tried this because of the anki integration but I don't think that's what it's meant for
Indeed, it's painful to get notes into Anki currently. I would prefer if I could get any text selected into a new Anki note with minimum number of keypresses, rather than creating flashcards in Polar and then syncing them, which seems rather inefficient.
I would like to make it more efficient for sure.
Part of the problem is actually Anki.
It's kind of janky and then there is the issue of firewalls that some people are running into which isn't fun.
I'm trying to smooth out the UI a bit more but it's an iterative process.