Elipsa Elipsa/Sage enote enhancements

[tucos9]

Hello, Kobo Developers

Aspiring noob here (with programming experience)

I noticed that around these forums the e-reader experience on Kobos is very much discussed, and there are many robust and lauded tools for that, from KOReader to Plato etc.

But what about the e-note experience?

I recently got my Elipsa and am very content with it thus far. The Advanced Notes work well, and the large screen is very suitable for textbooks and other large-format PDFs and such. But I steel feel it lacking in certain respects that to the unassuming eye would seem easily fixable. For instance (I will be assuming usage of the Stylus here):

• Adding a note to a text selection (in Epubs and Kepubs) still requires the virtual keyboard. It would be nice if we could employ the MyScript capabilities already present in the Advanced Notes, or even a subset of them, or heck, even the normal Basic note system, in order to take those notes instead of having to type them out letter by letter.
• PDFs don't even support adding notes except for directly onto the document. It would be nice if the "Add note" functionality from above could be added to text that was highlighted.
• Epubs and Kepubs already support freeform line annotations over the page, but not freeform highlighting, only "word-by-word" highlighting (what's the correct term for that, anyway?). When reflowed with different font settings, Kobo's solution to these freeform line overlays was to hide them behind some brackets around the textblock that was originally there.
• "word-by-word" highlights are not erasable through the Stylus erase button, even though they are creatable that way (but this would be a moot point if we could have the freeform highlights of the PDFs onto which to keep the "Add Note" context menu option already present for the "wbw" highlights)

Alas, my reason for this post is as following, and forgive the (quasi-intentional) tirade of questions, they're meant to be seen as an open-ended list of noob questions

How would someone with reasonable programming experience go about developing a mod such as this? Is the MyScript functionality present in the Advanced Notes available to be employed elsewhere in the system? Can Nickel be modded into this? Will NickelMenu be of use? Would KOReader or Plato support functionality such as this (I've noticed a few opened and ignored Issues raised on their githubs regarding this)? Where does one find the necessary resources to get oneself bootstrapped into developing features such as this (e.g. figuring out how the Stylus works, or the

[Quoth]

The MyScript is the Nebo App. Compare Nebo on Android and iOS tablets that have a pen/stylus/pencil digitizer.

It would be nice to be able to use a BT KB in the Notebooks (you can't) like you can in any window that uses the touch keyboard.

It would be nice to have handwriting recognition in the annotation window (I think hard for Kobo to integrate).

PDFs don't always have a text layer. It's a multilayer container and each layer can be text (often similar to postscript), lossless bit maps, vector art or whatever. It's trivial to add an extra image layer if there is no DRM. Hence PDFs work differently. A PDF is really a method of WYSIWG instructions/data for paper. It doesn't need sequential content. A real ebook is sequential HTML tags on the content text and option images with CSS styles for the tags. So creating a separate annotation file with highlighted source, position and user added text is trivial.

A PDF might not actually have text, and it's often not sequential, so a PDF can only easily be annotated by adding the annotation as a layer to the document.

Inherently word highlighting to select text for the annotation file is easy for epub. It's easier to treat a PDF as an image even if it has text.

All the things you suggest would be really hard for Kobo, who have the source. Also they might not have the source or much documentation on Nebo (the Notebooks) as it's a bought in app.

Also there is NO import to the Nebo based Notebooks other than copying Nebo files between ereaders (you also need an entry in Kobo ereader.conf).
Copy/paste even between notebooks doesn't seem to work and I only got it to append paste, not insert paste in a notebook.
Basic and Advanced Notebooks seem unrelated.


There is a Nebo viewer for Mac and maybe Windows. I suspect the Nebo files on the Sage/Elipsa will work with that and with the iOS and Android Nebo.

Short answer:
I doubt you can do more than implement a menu to import/export Nebo files via WiFi to iOS/Android Nebo.

[Quoth]

Oh, and as someone that's spent years proofing/annotating, I'll stick to text only on epub, because I can read that via calibre into a text file.

The Stylus based "annotations" is like a pencil in a book. No use for word-processing. I'd only use it on some PDF instruction manuals I ONLY use on the Sage. Maybe sometimes on service data PDF on the Elipsa, but I've not tried that yet.

I've worked professionally as programmer. Doing what you suggest isn't like dropping in Plato or KOReader as they are separate applications. Maybe KOReader can read the digitiser, but it likely wouldn't be able to use the Nebo app.