Annotate With Jarnal Plug-In Module for Wikindx

For my Ph.D. research, I had set up the Wikindx bibliography management system for use on my laptop to keep track of the papers that I had read or come across. Furthermore, I use it to store local copies of frequently accessed papers by attaching them as PDF files.

Because I’m using Jarnal to annotate these papers, I wanted to integrate the ability to launch Jarnal into Wikindx itself, and also to store the annotations in Wikindx along with the attached documents.

I wrote the Annotate With Jarnal plug-in module for Wikindx initially for my private use, so it’s not very polished. But it gets the job done.

The module adds an “Annotate With Jarnal” menu item to the “Resources” menu in Wikindx. To use it, copy the URL of an attached PDF file, and paste it into the module’s input box. The module then generates a Jarnal Meta File which (if everything is set up correctly) launches Jarnal with the PDF file as the background.

Here is a series of screen shots showing the module in action:

The result of the above sequence of steps is that Jarnal fetches the PDF file from Wikindx, and displays it for annotation:

The annotations can be saved using Jarnal’s “Network Save” feature. This writes the Jarnal file back to the “attachments” subdirectory in the Wikindx directory on the web server, with a file name created from appending the “.jaj” extension to the hash code of the annotated file. The next time the PDF file is opened through the module, the annotations will be loaded along with the PDF file.

A user must be logged in to Wikindx to use the module. However, beyond that, there is currently not a lot of security. Furthermore, the interface is not very easy to use. Ideally, there would be an “annotate” button or link next to each attached PDF file, so that the user does not have to bother with copying the URL and pasting it. Right now, there’s nothing to stop the user from entering a malformed or nonsense URL, but in most cases the module will respond by displaying an error message or doing nothing.

The module can also be used with the Macro Expander plug-in for WordPress, to provide a link to directly annotate a PDF file from a WordPress blog entry. I kept my research notes in a private WordPress blog on my laptop, and this feature allowed me to link to and annotate the relevant papers directly from my research notes.

For more information, and the source files, see the module’s web site on launchpad.net.

– davinci 11779

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