On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 1:26 PM, Christiaan Hofman <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 25 Jan 2009, at 4:53 PM, Rhet Turnbull wrote: > > The developers behind Yep & Leap (two excellent apps for tagging/organzing > PDFs and other files) have released an open source tagging framework for Mac > based on extended attributes called Open Meta. I believe this solves many > of the problems inherent in the various tagging applications on the Mac. As > a heavy user of both Yep and Skim, I would *love* to see Skim add integrated > support for Open Meta tags. The ability to view tags as well as modify them > in Skim would be helpful. This could be accomplished with applescripts from > Skim but an integrated approach would be much nicer and the fact that they > use extended attributes should play nicely with Skim's architecture. The > code is available and is released under Apache license. Any thoughts? > Yep & Leap: http://www.yepthat.com/ > Open Meta code: http://code.google.com/p/openmeta/ > Open Meta manifesto: OpenMeta.pdf > Cheers, > Rhet > > Basic support for these tags would indeed be rather easy as Skim already > does the hard part of accessing EAs. However, I doubt whether it's a good > idea to do this. There's a fundamental difference between Yep/Leap and Skim: > the former manages a bunch of files, and does not own the file data in any > way (it only owns references to the files), while Skim edits the files, and > owns the data for the file in its data model. What this means is that on an > edit of the tags, Yep/Leap can directly change the metadata of the file, > while in Skim you'd only edit the data in Skim's memory space. In Skim, the > metadata would be written to file only when the document is saved, and it's > read only when Skim opens or reverts the document. I hope you see the > difference. this could have serious unexpected results. E.g. any change to > the tags outside Skim (e.g. by Yep) while the PDF is open in Skim will be > lost when Skim saves the PDF. If you're not aware that Skim manages these > tags, this would lead to unexpected data loss. Is this acceptable? I doubt > it. > Christiaan >
It's a problem, but it's one that any text editor faces. The solution in that case is to check for modifications before writing to disk (at least that's what emacs does). I'm not going to advocate that it's worth the trouble to do this, since I don't currently feel the need to do all this tagging (but maybe someday I'll change my mind). Mark A ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by: SourcForge Community SourceForge wants to tell your story. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword _______________________________________________ Skim-app-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/skim-app-users
