Re: Xara Designer Pro+ questions about desktop publishing and note taking features
Should we call you Professor Acorn? You used three words in your post that I had to look up. But that's what quick access knowledge systems are for, so I learned three new words in less than a minute.Originally Posted by Acorn
So I've never been a fan of this concept you describe. Actually I've disliked this for the last 30 years. I see an interesting web page and would like to save it to my Zettelkasten full documents folder but I can't because it's a whole collection of things that's linked together in so many weird ways it's impossible to do that. But I see a scientific paper in Acrobat pdf format which has a collection of text, vector, and raster images all bundled together in a proper way and I can save it, move it around, email it, print it, and I love that. The pdf is about 10,000 times more useful than the html document. I wish the whole Internet would be based on pdfs and millions of other people would like that too.
OK, I actually did download and install Obsidian and also Excalidraw and have been trying them out for two weeks already. Here is an initial summary of my thoughts. If the founders had just used the JSON language which is used by the plug in Excalidraw, or SVG, instead of Markdown, it would be a great program for me as these other types can do much more complex arrangements of text, vector, and raster. And all three file types are text searchable. I like to have notes where the text and drawings are all mixed up together and trying to do that with linking is impractical as each note would be a collection of up to 100 separate files and if there were up to 100,000 of these types of notes in my system that would be 10,000,000 files and that arrangement isn't even possible in Obsidian. CAD drawings are such a collection of masses of text and vector blocks that are packed in one file so that's how it's done in that industry for good reason.
I hear you loud and clear! But I'm in a bind, yes I've tried many workarounds over a span of one month already to use Affinity as a note taking system and none of them even work 10% as good as Obsidian but Affinity has the complex document format I want and Obsidian does not.
Maybe, but there is a much bigger picture which is part of the whole note taking system. In the original Zettelkasten system there were (1) fleeting or rough notes, (2) A file box of permanent notes on cards containing titles and reference numbers, (3) An index with card title and reference numbers to find the cards, (4) full documents such as articles, papers, and books which might be in various places.
In the new digital Zettelkasten system, we often have the full documents in the form of the Internet or PDFs saved to the HDD. So then how do we find the information without the permanent notes and index cards? Digital indexing systems. In the beginning of the Internet people at companies like Yahoo manually created indexes for web pages, but this was obviously way too slow, and along came Google with search engines to do that job. In much the same way, the modern digital library might be able to live with mostly machine indexing. And we might use that rather because creating all those permanent notes manually is way too much work. But human written notes do have a place for one's own material and with so much information out here we need to make a note of where we found it.
But the human and machine indexes have to live in harmony. And how? First, the likely focus for me and most other people should be to create full documents, letters, note books such as lecture notes, research documents, user manuals, books and these should be done in a nice format that can be distributed in organizations, sent to colleagues, or even to customers. These should be done in a desktop publishing program to properly combine the text, vector, and raster in a professional format that can also be printed. If there is time left then we could make some permanent notes, but actually the permanent notes might just grow to eventually become the full documents, as is so often the case in my experience, so I might as well do everything in longer full documents in Affinity Publisher because indexing can now find the information in the longer documents and because short format permanent notes if used at all are now between 0-10% of the entire workflow.
The present dilemma is that Affinity Publisher doesn't have a Document Asset Management system to search the compressed file format. Obsidian does have this built in and their system is simpler because of the uncompressed text based Markdown and I understand indexing is also used. But just yesterday I did tests with indexing Adobe Acrobat documents and found I could find words in 0.027 seconds per instance and it produces a list of documents which are expandable to list all sentences with the word which is highlighted. Does this look like Obsidian or what? Indexing pdf documents results in 126 times faster searching than without indexing. Also pdfs can be previewed in Windows Explorer. Using Adobe Acrobat however is a two step process. But imagine if Affinity had a proper Document Asset Management system and the same type of indexing and searching plus a preview. Yes, this would be just as great as Obsidian now. No it's not Markdown but I don't think complex documents could ever be done in Markdown, all programs that output complex formats like Affinity Publisher, Adobe Indesign, CorelDRAW, Word, are binary. So I have no idea what I'm going to do in the interim while hoping for a proper DAM for Affinity. Maybe use the kludges.
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