#12 Gjots-feature to obtain near OneNote capability

[Anonymous]

Hi, thanks for the great program! I was wondering if you had any plans to add the functionality of Gjots(allows one to arrange text notes into a hierarchy) into Xournal sometime in the future - that would be really awesome! I nearly went back to windows on my tablet, because OneNote has this feature...but I didn't like the interface of onenote in general...

Gjots uses python,so there's no chance of simply combining codes...

[Denis Auroux]

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Sounds potentially useful. Added to to-do list, even though I have slightly mixed
feelings. Ideally, organizing documents like this should be the job of the OS or
desktop environment, not that of an individual application. In fact, what's a
directory but a hierarchical structure? (with files and sub-directories inside it...).

So, in this sense, all that's needed is a hierarchical (tree view) directory browser...
which one could add to Xournal, but it would be more sensible to have a GTK+ application
that offers a directory browser and can dynamically start and "swallow" other GTK+
applications to view and edit the documents being browsed. Or, if the "swallow" feature
is not needed, then any file manager (e.g. Nautilus) already does what you want in a way
(except it probably doesn't know that .xoj files are to be opened with Xournal)...

Denis.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

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agreed, actually, this is how OneNote does it, the pages are stored as separate files, but the interface for managing notes is really helpful -

"a directory browser and can dynamically start and "swallow"
other GTK+
applications to view and edit the documents being browsed."

I believe that would be the most useful way of doing it!

[Nobody/Anonymous]

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Honestly, the time when managing more than one note within the application is really important when that program has the facility to fuzzily SEARCH the handwritten notes. This is a KILLER (though understandably ammbitious) feature taht, in order to be useful, really requires the program to manage more than one note at a time. (Of limited usefullness would be searching within one multi-page note file.)

[hendrixski]

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Python and C can play very nicely with each other.

It would be pretty cool. So, like I'd have a page of hand-scribled text, and I just select a section of it with a box, then give that box a meta tag of some sorts, which is stored xournal and then I'd have an interface where I can create a list of how those boxes would be organized, and then it would cut and paste them onto a document for me?

SWEET.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

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So: there's this great handwriting recognition program called "cellwriter" which gave me an idea of how handwritten notes search could work.

Cellwriter assigns a probability score to each possibility for the strokes it's trying to recognize as a character. Here, we don't even need to get as far as making a decision as to which character is really there.

I can imagine it working like this: The scores could be calculated and saved with the strokes as soon as they are entered in as metadata.

If that were to happen, then the "notes manager" or what-have-you could search a group of handwritten notes for anything. You'd search for "monkey" - and the search would find any 5 characters where the appropriate letters were reasonable possibilities, based on these precomputed scores.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

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At least some sort of multi-note management within the program itself would be an incredibly useful feature. The problem with simply using something like Nautilus, as suggested above, to manage notes is that if viewing Xournal full screen, you have to switch windows multiple times, and the taskbar can become incredibly cluttered. While obviously not a deal breaker, this is a rather clunky way to browse, say, a notebook for class. Gournal has a rudimentary page management system, and I think at least something on that level would be a great boon.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

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To avoid this "clutter" issue, maybe just tabbed notes (like gedit) would be a start?

[Nobody/Anonymous]

I like hendrixski's concept, but would be perfectly happy with something where labels/descriptions could be assigned to any region of the document, and manually organized/positioned in a tree connected with the document (something which is stored as part of the xoj file). This tree would be only used for outlining/organizing notes or annotations, and would permit quick jumping to the location associated with any of the nodes in the tree.

The ability to reconstruct new documents based on these defined regions would probably be a bit of work to program, whereas just navigating to a stored location would probably be easier and a useful feature in its own right.

btw, Denis, if you are both presently at MIT, maybe you could consider collaborating with Matt Rasmussen on integrating some of the features of his Keepnote program (http://code.google.com/p/keepnote/) into Xournal or vice versa.