[okfn-discuss] Mendely: beyond PDF, annotations in general, other thoughts (some OT)

[philippe.aigrain at sopinspace.com]

Hi Luis,

Right now, you have 2 ways to make enquiries on the future of COMT /
co-ment :
- Creating a ticket on the community site at www.co-ment.org
or
- Writing at contact at co-ment.net (which is just an alias not an email list)

However, it it is of course perfectly OK to ask here (OKFN is part of our
home in the universe).

So the answer to your question is :
- COMT supports markdown import today. You can use it either by installing
the alpha version (http://www.co-ment.org) or by using a demo workspace
that we have created for testers. We would be pleased to count you in, as
well as any other OKFN interested person. Just confirm to my email address
(in copy). I will separately copy the co-ment developers.
- Somewhere between 20 January and end of January we will put in place a
new generation of co-ment Web services based on COMT.

Finally please note that one key enabler for expanding co-ment takeup
would be a OpenDocument to markdown converter (meaning cleaning up all the
styles while keeping some basic structure). John MacFarlane (philosopher
and developer of pandoc) had done some premilanry efforts at this. A
M$Word to markdown (without going through OpenDocument converter would
also be useful) but is clearly more stupidly complex work.

Best,

Philippe

> On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 9:44 AM, Philippe Aigrain
> <philippe.aigrain at sopinspace.com> wrote:
>> Does not fit your imemdiate needs of annotating PDF, but in our new
>> version
>> of the co-ment annotation system, we took a strong orientation of using
>> simple structured text formats such as markdown. For PDFs containing
>> text,
>> it is relatively easy to go PDF to markdown. Of course for PDF
>> containing
>> images of texts, this is another story.
>>
>> See www.co-ment.net for existing co-ment
>> www.co-ment.org for future version
>
> Hi, Philippe-
> I don't find a mailing list on co-ment.org so I hope it is OK if I ask
> here.
>
> Is there an ETA for COMT and/or co-ment.net supporting markdown
> import? I will be doing a project soon that I'd like to use COMT or
> co-ment for, and I'd really prefer to use markdown as the core of my
> toolchain for the project, so markdown support would be ideal.
>
> Thank you-
> Luis
>