Yeah.
Making codes (essentially tags) and memos to any textual information is sooo great.
With codes the issue currently is, that you can apply codes to sentences, and with dataview extract those sentences tagged with a tag. But what if you want to code a word, a few words or multiple sentences, sort of like a marginnote that summarises a section.
One can workaround the issue of memos, by just citing the material, full copy paste with the source and attach the thoughts. But it’s a little cumbersome.
If one had a plug-in where one could select text, press some key to attach a code, so a tag would be a fine or if one could press some key to attach a memo that connects exactly to the text selection that would be grand.
I guess, people who have not used atlas.ti and the features it has (talking about codes and memos mainly not the automated analysis [gimmicks]), might not know why this would be useful. But I highly encourage you to check it out (short explainer video). This is not an advertisement for the software. I just want to highlight the working and usefulness of essentially just textual annotations.
I guess with the line and column indexing system used by vim [which I suppose can be imposed on any plain text file], one could use that to connect any textual annotations to any text documents.
Oh, I forgot, additionally, it would be even greater if one could make those textual annotations into pdf documents, downloaded html pages and what not. Sure one can try to convert those into markdown, but working with two copies of a document in markdown and the pdf, is just weird, not to mention the issues that arise from copy pasting - tried it and wasn’t too happy with it.
So, an obsidian plugin that can both index pdf-files (html-files as a secondary external source) and the markdown-files already used by obsidian to attach “notes” (codes, memos) would be the solution. What do you think?
I think this would even be so essential to the idea of linked thinking that it might even be of interest to core-obsidian, but that is of course also a hunch to get someone interested in the idea. I really think this would improve and extend the fantastic environment for linked-thinking (as nick milo calls it) that obsidian is even further and be of great benefit to anybody. What do you think?