Would this be useful for an academic research group?

Full disclosure, I work for Stack Overflow.

Yes, we think so. We have academic clients using it at computer science departments.

You can see how data scientists use it here https://stackoverflow.com/teams/use-cases/data-analytics

I’m intrigued. I’m trying to develop my own Q&A software for client questionnaires in the investment management industry as the industry solutions charge too much ($10,000 per year). Could be a great market for SO to tap and I’m going to consider SO for our work

Was this patent filed before or after the head of USPS was installed by the Dear Leader?

Patents take several years to be granted. This is an application, it was filed February 7, 2020.

Is there a handwritten (stylus) notes software which can be used for this type of linking? I'm not talking about OCR, but handwritten/drawn as default format.

I'd be interested to see a description of the concept behind this -- it looks fun/pretty, but what is the concept and structure?

I'm certainly drawn to the idea and am inclined positively towards it. I'm even willing to overlook the ridiculous hubris of "This new medium will be the way most text is read and written in the future."

However, there are many confusing things to me as a person who arrived at the site through HN. Since one of the developers is promoting the "app" here, it might be useful to hear from him on these points:

1. Is this an input format or is it a publication format, or is it a viewer? Does it rely on a time-tested plaintext markup format like LaTeX or markdown? Perhaps it is a HTML viewer for a LaTeX markup document with special structure, rather than an actual typset web publication format.

2. What is the conceptual structure of the document system? Giving me a screenshot does not show me anything about the way you are conceptualizing your document. Is there a separation of content and output, output and viewer?

3. Is any part of this open source? Are you incorporating any other major technologies which have already been developed?

I apologize if any of the above seems harsh, but this is an important topic and I have become slightly tired of seeing flashy presentations about poorly-thought out "revolutionary" new document formats/tools/whatnot.

The hubris of the statement is not lost on me, but what should a founder be but delusional and optimistic :)

1. It's both a viewer and a word processor. It relies on Markdown (and LaTeX through extensions). We export to Md, but will be adding more import/export options in the future. We hope to create a publication standard for it.

2. The structure of the document is an "outline of index cards". Each card can have one or more children. Source content (in markdown) is edited by toggling edit mode on that card.

3. Yes, we are extracting parts of this as open-source. The rest remains proprietary (for now, at least).

> I apologize if any of the above seems harsh

No need to apologize. Thoughtful criticism is what we need.

Thanks!

> It relies on Markdown (and LaTeX through extensions). We export to Md, but will be adding more import/export options in the future. We hope to create a publication standard for it.

Do we need a new standard for structured documents? Would a <section> not be sufficient?

For three levels deep, no we don't need a new standard. Larger trees, linked together will probably need something new.

Larger trees are fine with <section>, and linking together is already defined with <a>.

Why does it matter how many levels there are?

He's probably talking about many-to-many relationships that he has planned.

Hi Adrioano,

I've been working on a relatively similar, but much larger and very complex project (AI/Maths) for some years now. It makes me really happy to see people coming up with the vision of a "hypertext" perspective shift.

Do you mind explaining why your surname is Ferrari?

"Hypertext" perspective shift... I like that. What's your project called? Can I see it?

PS: My ancestry goes: Italian > Argentinian > born in Kuwait > living in Canada. "Ferrari" means iron-worker in Italian, so it's not a rare surname in Italy.

Check your mail (I'll probably land in your spam folder).

PS: Very interesting ancestry, wish I had more knowledge into my own. It led me to think that you might be related to the Ferrari Company somehow.

Check your mail.

PS: Very interesting ancestry, wish I had more knowledge into my own. It led me to think that you might be related to the Ferrari Company somehow.

The 2011 video I referenced in my other comment was taken along Coorow-Latham road, in WA, with the same camera motions... Perhaps this one was also taken there?

Interesting utility, and kudos for making it OSS! Something I couldn't help but notice is that it is very similar to a short film which played at TIFF 2011 called "Coorow-Latham Road" by Blake Williams, a 20 minute video work which played in the Wavelengths experimental section of the festival.

A short clip of the video is available here: http://vimeo.com/26850823

Amusingly, the artist has created another version of the video, now that hyperlapse is available: https://vimeo.com/63778677

The original film, Coorow-Latham Road, is edited and manipulated from screenshots of a Google street view road trip along the length of a road in rural Australia. The camera rotates 180 degrees from forward to backward along the 20 minute trip.

This may be a case where art inspires software, which is an interesting phenomenon in itself, or maybe it's a freak coincidence!

This seems to work well -- I imagine I would use it if I were using a temporary computer, an ipad, or some such thing. What would be nice is if I could integrate it with dropbox or similar services, essentially use it to edit and compile files in my dropbox library. Also it would be good to use a standard editor with config files that could be saved to customize the environment.

Thanks for the comments - glad you liked it! We're working on the offline integration and user customisation features, they're in the pipeline.

Indeed, and I hope it stays out of scope forever. The idea of reflow is anathema to the idea of typesetting, as far as I can see.

Amazing - I am attempting to install this on mac osx lion -- it is taking a lot of time because of the dependencies. With so many dependencies the probability of failure is very high. Let's hope it works.

I urge you to find a way to allow people to install your software more easily.

I managed to get it to install (after about an hour and a half of tinkering. However I get "Segmentation fault" when I try running it:

pdf2htmlEX --debug=1 test.pdf

temporary dir: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv

Preprocessing: ....

Working: Add new temporary file: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv/__css

Add new temporary file: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv/__pages

Add new temporary file: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv/p1.png

Install font: (29 0) -> f1

Add new temporary file: /tmp/pdf2htmlEX-LY9cOv/f1.pfa

Segmentation fault: 11

I was able to install

cmake, fontforge and libpoppler with homebrew,

gcc-4.7 using

https://github.com/sol-prog/gcc-4.7-binary

you mean `poppler` instead of `libpoppler`

     sudo apt-add-repository ppa:coolwanglu/pdf2htmlex   
     sudo apt-get update
     sudo apt-get install pdf2htmlex

I haven't yet tried to build on mac os, but in ubuntu it was trivially simple.

It's confirmed by some guys using Mac. We are working on this. Please hold on, and join the discussion on github if you like. Thanks for your patience.

The compiling problem should have been fixed. Could you please try the latest master branch, see if it works well or maybe fail at one assertion?

Thank you for replying - I tried the new branch, and posted the problem I encountered as an issue with gists attached on the github.

I cannot reproduce it with a 20110222 version of fontforge.

Would you mind send me the pdf file, for me to debug?

Does it always crash, with other pdf files?

yes - it crashes as described with any pdf file.

sorry to hear that. some guys are working on MacPorts and Homebrew formula.

I hope this would help you. https://trac.macports.org/ticket/36028

The problem is that I don't have a machine with Mac. Which version of fontforge have you installed?

This is what fontforge displays when I start it up:

Executable based on sources from 14:57 GMT 31-Jul-2012-D. Library based on sources from 14:57 GMT 31-Jul-2012.

I'm now trying compile with an older version. But please update fontforge if you can.

I think my fontforge is the current version (see above) -- please correct me if I'm wrong.

Usually I built from git. There has been some improvement relevant to pdf2htmlEX during the path month.

However it should not crash, and it's confirmed by many people now.

Could you please try the commit f02e1d4 ?