Markdown in Bookpedia?

[mtolincoln]

I would love to see the power of Markdown markup syntax in some fields in Bookpedia--Comments, Summary, Notes particularly. Would love to be able to highlight text using Bold (**), Italics (*), and a felt marker kind of highlight using perhaps a backtick (`). These features could be used to add emphasis and highlights to longer text sections. I guess this would require a Markdown Preview sort of function. This sort of feature would let me productively use Bookpedia as a more useful repository for notes and comments on what I read or think is particularly important about some books in my collection.

Thank you for considering such a suggestion.

MTO

[Conor]

Thank you about the suggestion of using Markdown. As you mentioned the longer notes, comments, summary fields could do with some highlighting in cases. Implementing this feature we would like to use the Apple internal formatting to keep the interface familiar. Technical that is a bit complex as both the formatting information needs to be stored in the database while still maintaining a fast search speed with the plain text. The change also migrates down to a number of features, such as exports (how to include the formatting in different export options), Doghouse contributions and backups among some.

Your markdown suggestion avoids some of the pitfalls mentioned above as it's still plain text being stored. So it could be a good intermediary compromise between more formatting and keeping the database structure intact. Although it then pushes the development to a markdown capable preview text field that would switch to regular text when being edited.

I've added it to my list of ideas to explore and include.

[OogieM]

Ressurecting an old thread to ask about something similar.

I've moved most of my notes, general info, kanban boards etc into Obsidian, which is a markdown based note and knowledge management system. I've started to use the Obsidian Kindle Plug-in to extract out lots of data including bibliographic data and annnotations (quotes and my personal notes) out of my kindle books into markdown notes I can then use within Obsidian as part of my linked research/reference system. I use Zotero to manage a bibliographic database of scientific research papers that I have in PDF form and the add-ons ZotFile and MDNotes and the PDF app Highlights to get the data and annotations (highlighted quotes and my own color coded notes) also into Obsidian so that I can link and reference those items. Within Obsidian I use the Dataview plug-in to collate and present various data like how many books read in a given timeframe etc. I tested Readwise for Kindle annotations but eliminated it for now.

Bookpedia has my entire book collection, my owned Kindle books, the borrowed (usually via Kindle Unlimited) kindle books and thousands of real paper books. I'd like some way to include Bookpedia into the mix because of the paper books that I reference from within there. My idea is that I can get the same sort of markdown basic bibliographic data into Obsidian but then add my own notes as well on all book types. As I add things into Bookpedia I'd like to run some sort of update or even better, have it automatically update and send to Obsidian basic notes for new items with names I choose based on my own naming scheem (copy Zotero's for a perfect implementation) and then I can add in notes and annotations. Right now as I read paper books I annotate in GoodNotes on my iPad and then convert to markdown files by text recognizing the data and import that into Obsidian. Which works surprisongly well but misses the bibliographic information.

So any ideas or way to accomplish this?

Any possibilities with this or has anyone already implemented such a structure and how did you do it?

I could, of course, export a BibTeX file and import it into Zotero and abandon Bookpedia but I like keeping my data siloed and I prefer the way I cn add things into Bookpedia and my custom data fields.