[CiceroCiceronis]

Cahier looks like exactly what I’ve been hoping for for a long time. People have been taking “knowledge management” seriously for a few years now and we have a number of great tools like Obsidian, Zotero, Anki, and their brethren. But there’s still no real good solution to properly highlight and annotate documents, then link those outside their originating document into the broader context of one’s notes. Instead you end up with multiple silos—a Zotero full of papers, an Obsidian full of notes etc. This strikes me as a definite step in the right direction—thinking about knowledge management as an integrated process, with a workflow right through from reading, to taking notes, to organising those notes, to actively employing them to generate new insights and effectively write.

(I guess my only concern is around potentially reinventing the wheel when it comes to some of these areas. E.g. do you plan to integrate every feature from Zotero, like the web-integrated grabber? That sounds like a prodigious amount of work, but without it it’s hard to fully supplant Zotero as a reference management solution. I’m curious as to your roadmap for this and what you see as the ultimate feature set and user workflow.)

[vasvir]

Hypothesis https://web.hypothes.is/ is pretty good at keeping notes on PDF.

Normally it anchors the annotations for any url but i believe that for PDF is also doing some extra checksum magic to uniquely identify the PDF and apply the annotations.

Furthermore you can have collaboration features such as group annotations. Useful for classes or science labs...

[kaba0]

I have been thinking about this program for a long time now, and one area I haven’t seen covered are references that work even across different versions of the same document (e.g. the book got a new version, but still has the same chapter more or less unchanged, or you highlighted something based on the epub, and switched to the PDF). Hypothesis’s implementation works quite well, as they were sort of forced to handle it due to web pages always changing (they store some of the surrounding context).

[dragonhuang]

Have you tried Heptabase? (https://heptabase.com/)

[CiceroCiceronis]

No, will check it out, thanks!

[felipefar]

This is exactly why I created Cahier. I want to make it excel at the capture and processing steps of the research workflow. We're close to having the foundational features of the software in place and will release the beta soon.

But we want to expand the supported attachment file formats (possibly with video and audio as well), with full annotation and referencing support, more formatting options in the note editor, .bib import/export, synchronization, linux and mobile apps.

I don't plan on having feature parity with Zotero. I think we can provide more value by focusing on the features that explore the interaction between the annotations and notes and on supporting more media types.