notes-from-pdf

Paste handler and other features intended for copying text from a PDF into markdown notes
akstuhl
0.4.2 1,288
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Notes from PDF package

This package for the Atom text editor adds an alternative paste command that may be accessed via:

  • notes-from-pdf:paste in the command palette
  • keybinding ctrl-alt-v
  • Packages → Notes from PDF → Paste from PDF (in the menu bar)

This paste mode is designed to facilitate copying text from a PDF document as a quotation. It performs the following steps on incoming text, each enabled via settings:

  • Replace line breaks with spaces
  • Repair line-break hyphenations
  • Trim whitespace from start and end
  • Change typographers' quotes/apostrophes to regular ones and replace double-quotes with single-quotes

When used in combination with the language-markdown package, it will copy a page number from the start of the previous list item when a new line is added, e.g.:

- p.1 "My first point is such and such."
- p.2 "This becomes more complex when we consider blah."
- p.2

Background

These features were designed to save time and effort in a markdown-based notetaking and writing system inspired by Scott Selisker's "A Plain Text Workflow for Academic Writing with Atom" and The Archive. The main idea was to reduce the amount of time spent manually deleting line breaks, etc. when pasting text from a PDF document into a notes file. If there are other features that you think would serve a similar purpose in this kind of workflow, please feel free to suggest them via issues in this repository.