biff VS zim-desktop-wiki

I am currently reading many books and papers and use highlighting a lot. My life would be a lot better if I could automatically extract the highlighted text. I tried several (by now outdated) solutions like Biff (https://github.com/soulisalmed/biff ), RCU and https://remarkable-web.vercel.app/ . The first two are apparently outdated, and the last I can't connect to (and all my files are >4 MB, so manual select doesn't work).

How? Do you use https://github.com/soulisalmed/biff? Thanks!

I just want to spread awareness that an amazing tool first posted here (github here) is lying in destitution since the 2.7 real highlight update.

> For example, there's no direct switching between documents.

In case you haven't seen it already: https://github.com/ddvk/remarkable-hacks

The ddvk hacks are easy to apply and reversible. They add a bunch of gestures like instantly flipping between documents. One of my other favorites is a quick swipe gesture to switch to the last-used tool.

I don't want to annotate PDFs and then only save the annotations, but it sounds like biff would help with that if you don't mind another tool in the chain: https://github.com/soulisalmed/biff

I use mine quite a bit for annotating documents and presentations. Provided the screen size works for you (you have to be comfortable reading somewhat smaller font sizes than usual), it's quite good for how I work. As another poster pointed out, it follows a different model than most PDF readers, in that annotations are done just like on paper; you don't select text and highlight, you just highlight like you would on paper. My first reaction was that this was lame, but I've come around to feeling that it's probably the right approach for me, in that my mind is not constantly switching between reading and selection modes. Your annotations do sync back to the computer, but to get annotations out in a way that's reusable in other software, you have to use third-party software like "Biff": https://github.com/soulisalmed/biff (there are others too) Another positive thing about it is that because the interface is very sparse and you're working with it largely like paper, you don't have to devote mental load to worrying about accidentally pressing buttons onscreen or about whether palm rejection is going to work or not (at least if you're right-handed). I find that freeing.

I'll slightly modify your argument; because Pure HTML does suck:

Why don't people make static sites with a simple "Markdown-or-Similar to HTML" converter, CSS, and vanilla JS...etc?

(This is what I do, btw -- http://zim-wiki.org + a template)

You should add Zim [1] to the "Personal Knowledge Management" section :)

[1] https://zim-wiki.org

https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

And I just tweaked the CSS and added a bit of logic to included the possibility of one image per slide; as well as editing slides not with raw HTML but with https://zim-wiki.org (because that's what I'm really used to, I'm sure any Markdown thing would work just as well).

Absolutely; recently I realize I wish I'd never learned vim. I use too many other programs that are at least CUA-ish ( http://zim-wiki.org is the most important app I use ) and now I kind of want out. I haven't yet tried Modeless Vim, but that looks like my next experiment.

https://github.com/SebastianMuskalla/ModelessVim

It is so hard not to feel REALLY SMUG reading stuff like this, as someone who has run my own website as the working primary source for my college instruction for the past 15 years or so using https://zim-wiki.org. (before Markdown was much of a thing!)

It's borderline bizarre to have watched this method of doing things kind of die out, and then also come back in the form of "static site generators" -- which, frankly, are still way clunkier than this.

Write in Zim, export to html, rsync to site. Easy.

FWIW, I've been using http://zim-wiki.org for YEARS. (Sites a little messy and I need to clean it up, but it's extremely functional,) I host my college classes websites from it, to the point that I forced myself to learn the Canvas API, to just clone the page from this site to the front page of Canvas and change the links so they come back here.

jrm4.com