Best practise regarding process other people's text for learning?

Curious about your working process regarding processing text that you have not written that you want to learn or structure in various ways.

For example it would make sense to highlight the important things. However then it would make sense if I can see all those highlights somewhere.

I can do this if the text I process is in the form of a pdf and I use Pdf++. However I dont see how to highlight and process text that I have just copy pasted into Obsidian in the same way. I can highlight text. But it does not show up anywhere unless I Paste it manually. But then it does not contain any link to the original scource.

Curious about how you guys are doing this

Take a look at Pandoc’s Lua Filters.

Here is an example of a Lua filter that converts strong emphasis to small caps:

return {
  {
    Strong = function (elem)
      return pandoc.SmallCaps(elem.content)
    end,
  }
}

or equivalently,

function Strong(elem)
  return pandoc.SmallCaps(elem.content)
end

This says: walk the AST, and when you find a Strong element, replace it with a SmallCaps element with the same content.
[…]
Lua filters are tables with element names as keys and values consisting of functions acting on those elements.

You can interactively run code inside your Obsidian notes using these community plugins:

Note that Pandoc is not fully compatible with Obsidian out of the box—however the Pandoc community plugin is dedicated to bring seamless integration.

My take on this being an avid Dataview user is to use inline fields to mark out the highlights. See post below for a larger example on how to insert pointers and highlight bits and pieces of your text, readily available for extraction by Dataview.

Thanks Holroy. That sounds like something I was looking for. Will check it out, thanks a lot!

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