In my earlier post on PDF highlighting, I promised to say a bit more about the related topic of note taking. This is that promised post.
Like all recent versions of Sente, Sente for iPad supports multiple notes per reference. This makes it easy to create "atomic" notes, or notes that make a single point, as opposed to one long note on each reference.
In Sente for iPad (and Sente 6.2, which is about to be released), this is taken a step further. In these new versions, each note can appear either only within a PDF, or also in your list of notes for a reference. Which of these options you will want will depend on your intentions.
Suppose, for example that you are simply reading a paper, highlighting some passages of interest, and you want to record some questions you have as you are reading. These may be best handled as PDF-only notes. They will show up in your PDF as little yellow sticky icons, which can be tapped to pop open a larger note display containing your questions. This kind of note will not show up in the list of notes for the reference and cannot be seen anywhere other than within the PDF itself.
On the other hand, suppose that you are gathering background material for your own work, and you find something in a paper that you may want to refer to later in your own writing. In this case you would probably want to create a full note (possibly including a quotation) instead of a PDF-only note. When you do this, you will see the same display in the PDF view as in the first case, but when you are looking at the single reference view, you would see the complete note, including any quotation and your comments. You will also see these notes when you format a citation using any bibliography format that includes notes, for example for printing or exporting.
In the Sente for iPad interface, when you highlight a passage and select Quote, it assumes you are creating a full note that you want to see in your list of notes for the reference. If you select Comment, Sente will choose the option that you used the last time you selected the Comment command. You can change the setting on any note at any time using the button in the top-right corner of the note editor.
In the Sente database, each note includes a title, page number, quotation, and comment. When you specify a note as PDF-only, all of these fields are hidden other than the comment field. The screen shot below shows a note set to display in "PDF and Notes."
In upcoming releases, we will be adding the ability to jump from a note in your note list directly to the spot in the PDF where the note was created. The support for this is already in the database, but the interface did not make the cut-off for the first release. And there will be a number of other, note-related additions in the coming months; we think this is an important area for the future.
Finally, the same options that you see here will be present in desktop Sente 6.2, which will be available shortly.
Are notes still ordered alphabetically? And if yes, is there any plan to change that or make optional sorting in order of creation?
Notes in the note list are ordered by page number in the document. When there are multiple notes per page, then they are ordered by title within that page because there is not a good way to determine the order within a page.
Yes, but we are hoping that Michael, in his infinite wisdom, will find a way to solve the "there is not a good way to determine the order within a page" problem! As an interim, I am starting each title with a number to preserve correct order.
Michael, as I read on the forums, this has been a concern of some users for some time. So the question is: Is this something that is not possible because of the database and the way the notes are stored?
Of course sorting in creation order does not make sure the notes follow the page structure, but it would make it possible for those taking notes in this way to use this feature better, and you could make it optional.
Or is it something that you do not see a reason for implementing?
The ways to solve the problem right now (editing the title or page numbers) will be very cumbersome on the iPad, that is why I think this is a very valid concern for some users, me included.
Thanks!
"And there will be a number of other, note-related additions in the coming months; we think this is an important area for the future."
Thanks, btw, for the new Note Editor in both the forthcoming iPad version and Sente 6.2 update. Being able to, on a note-by-note basis, decide whether a note should appear in the reference's notes list or just in the PDF margin provides a nice bit of previoiusly missing flexibility. Likewise for the new ability to (optionally) create a "comment-only" (i.e., sans quotation) note. Scholars in the humanities fields—for whom reading is the research—often need to capture exact quotations for copying into manuscripts, but otoh those of us in the sciences—for whom our reading is more about just staying current—don't often need to capture exact quotations so much as just jot down comments summarizing the "take home points." Lastly, that forthcoming ability to jump from a note to the relevant spot in the text will be highly useful, as attested to by the several times that's been requested on the forums. Thanks in advance for that one.
While even more note management features, like perhaps the ability to manually reorder notes, etc., as well as stuff we haven't even thought of, will be fantastic, when they arrive, it looks like Sente is already taking a welcome, big step forward on the notes front. Reference managers sure have come a long way since EndNote 1.0!
They have come a long way indeed! But for me, the most striking thing is that the reference manager is no longer central to what I do. I only occasionally need to compile references into a manuscript, and, of course, when I do, managers are very helpful.
But most of all what the progress in Sente really means is that there will be a way to find new papers, study them, and annotate them on a tablet device. It seems obvious, but there is one detail: that this process never really worked well on a computer. Reading .pdf files is awkward on a computer screen, even worse on these modern widescreen laptops. You find yourself wishing you could just print everything out. Paper discovery is an awful mess in normal web browsers: you end up with twenty open tabs, shibboleths and athens logins which never work, files that end up who knows where, and then you have to add it all into Sente. What a pain!
That's why I think that Sente desktop will quickly become (for me) a little more than an add-on which I will only use when writing papers. But Sente for iPad, instead, will be my daily bread. This mirrors the way in which my iPad - bought as a gadget on release - has gradually shouldered my iMac into an ever more marginal role in my digital life. And it is incredibly reassuring to know that even if you barely ever sync your iPad (I barely ever do), Sente backs all your work up anyway, so should disaster happen, nothing is lost. This is the direction, it seems to me, in which computing is headed: towards specialised services which handle one task, or a set of tasks, to perfection, with the cloud as a central hub. Well done to Sente for figuring this all out and doing things in beautiful and efficient way.
No, the prosaic bit - I really hope this long awaited app gets released before we all leave for holidays and before the holiday budget is fully spent.... Will we be lucky on a Monday, Michael?!?
I think the note taking is certainly a useful feature of the software.
I like to record quotes and my observations for use in my final assignment (and I guess that's one of the reasons why the notes exist).
However, try as I might, I cannot work out how to export a complete set of notes to one document in Word 2004 (for Mac).
I guess I am missing something, but would be grateful for some help please.
Ta
Geoff
PS - I am running desktop version 6.2, but when I access the help and faqs, the help file relates to v6.1 (so I guess some assistance may be missing)
Ta
Regarding Geoff's above post, I was wondering if anyone has an answer. Is it possible to export a complete list of notes to document, like Word or Pages.
Thanks,
Andrew
Hi Andrew
You can get notes out to a word processor in a couple of ways.
1) select a note in its entirety (clicking on the triangle is the easiest way -- the entire note will be boxed), then press cmd-a to select all, then cmd-c to copy, paste into a word processor
2) modify a bib format to include notes and use it for one of your export "gestures" (e.g., drag and drop, copy / paste, etc.)
Michael