OK. I look forward to hearing your comments and ideas. A couple of things that I might start thinking about are:
- Extracting tables: the plain text output makes table columns hard to work with and I find myself trying to line things up with regular expressions or in a spreadsheet. I am thinking that I could use another pen colour for tables and have vertical lines define the table columns. Still need to think that one through.
- An option that allows the user to specify a portion of selected text to be written into the manifest, either as the title or in the description. That way you could just read an article, mark-up the title of the article and have it processed by the script to appear as the title or description.
- An option to writing the output as XML instead of plain text. That had better wait until I get a better grasp of XML
- Instead of writing new files each time (as the script does at the moment) compare coordinates of snippets and only add/delete those that have changed. This would allow external additions to the tags file, for example.
One other thing to note: this rewrites the snippets and tags files each time. So, if you manually add other tags to the tags file (I was originally thinking about exporting keywords from jabref) they'll get wiped out next time you process the folder.