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Comment by jtbayly | Hacker News Reader

So it's just the front-end, relying on you to manually write all the HTML. I'd love some software to make generating these (or similar) annotated documents easily. Any ideas?

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Yeah I was thinking the same thing. A GUI where the original text material is loaded, then you highlight it and write the annotations. Bonus of each annotation could be tweeted/tooted/whatevered and include open graph screenshots of the annotation.

Also, I'm sure you didn't mean to trivialize the project, but it's more than "just a front end". The design is what's really great about it.

Sounds similar to Ted Nelson's Xanadu project.

Fermat's Library offers something that comes relatively close https://fermatslibrary.com/margins

Slightly tangential: is there software that converts multi-LaTeX PDFs into responsive HTML in a reasonable way? I'd read more of these papers if they were more viewable on a phone-size viewport.

Pandoc?

I assume there's probably a way to modify or configure MD-based SSGs to produce side notes instead of footnotes. Hilariously I think you could use RMD because that has built-in sidenote functionality but it would probably require some manual effort to produce those nice highlights. That said, Molly is also making use of footnotes inside her margin notes, so if that's the goal my suggestions might not work.

This is what my fork of her project does https://github.com/kees-/annotate :)

Well, all it does is generate her identical format from a spec. Like @bradgessler said a gui to coerce annotations to that format from highlighting would be awesome

Cool idea, why don't you have a go at it and share the outcome on HN.

You might find https://web.hypothes.is/ helpful.

Does Hypothesis require a cloud account that syncs your annotations? If so, these products are a non-starter for any corporate environment, which is unfortunate.

Obsidian gets this right. Most software these days doesn't which is a shame.

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