[MN 4.0 feature request] PDF auto hyperlink peek

tl;dr in the below.

Marginnote has done a wonderful job creating a new way to read a book interactively. One of my favorite things is that MN has solved every paper book’s problem by creating an excerpt of previous equations. However, when the study map scales, it is hard to keep up with the links because the map gets too complicated. MN should introduce ‘peeking’ linked node when I’m reading the text.

----------------------- Situation --------------------------

Many college textbook authors have a bad habit of expecting readers to remember every single equation they mentioned before and they just conveniently refer to an equation from page 12 when he’s explaining something on page 120.

It always goes like:
"…according to the equation (2.13) we proved before, this new equation (3.4) can also be transformed to… "

Duh. Now I have to go back to chapter 2 and try to find equation 2.13 that I have no idea what that is.

----------------- What I do with Marginnote -------------------
Unlike the official MN tutorial, I don’t ‘regroup’ equation excerpts altogether. I just make excerpts separately along with other excerpts. Instead, I ‘link’ them when the equations are related.
However, as I mentioned above, it gets harder to keep track of the equations when the mind map scales. So when I face a equation (2.13) while I’m reading, I have to MANUALLY FIND equation (2.13) from ‘search’ and go to that excerpt to see what’s in it. Then I have to come back to the original text and try to make another excerpt and link them together.

This is so tiring.

---------------------------- My suggestion ------------------------------

It would be much better if I somehow could make MN ‘remember’ that the text string ‘equation (2.13)’ is referring to ‘equation (2.13) excerpt’ from the previous chapter. Let alone low quality scanned ebooks, even original good-quality ebooks these days don’t support this and it is so frustrating.

If Marginnote can somehow remember a text string ‘equation (2.13)’ refers to a particular excerpt created before, it can then let me ‘peek’ that excerpt without leaving the book’s text. That would be just wonderful. Imagine when you’re reading a book and you see an equation (2.13) that you have no idea what that was. Marginnote turns that plain text string into some kind of hyperlink and now when you click on it it gives you a peek of that excerpt without leaving the page. That’s gonna be a super innovative feature that no one has ever tried before AFAIK.

I don’t think it’s terribly hard thing to do because it’s basically searching for a key text string from the entire document and giving it a hyperlink. Of course, UI-wise you have to be clever to make it less complicated but I think you get the idea.

It would be so awesome to see this feature introduced in MN 4.0.

---------------------------- tl;dr -----------------------------------
It sucks to go back and find what equation (2.13) was when reading chapter 10 in a textbook. So make a feature that searches text string ‘equation (2.13)’ that MN remembers as an excerpt, and make every match in the PDF a peek-able button. i.e, when you click on the matching text, it now shows the linked excerpt by which you can easily check what equation (2.13) was.

2 Likes

That’s an OCR based amazing feature which expanded OCR range of application.

We will consider it sincerely. (It even seems similar with AI Semantic recognition:笑:)

Lanco
Support Team