"Export considered harmful"
Because software rarely operate on "files in folders" anymore, "export" is increasingly the way software exposes data. But usually you don't want a dead snapshot; you want to "use this data elsewhere"—which requires repeatedly exporting & reconciling.
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Say I make an app for annotating papers. An old-fashioned way to do this would be to make a desktop app which views PDF files and writes annotations into the file. Now Spotlight can see them; Zotero can display them; etc. But SaaS must "import" the PDF and "export" annotations.
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But "export annotations" is not the same as "save annotations" because now if I add more annotations to the PDF, I must export them again, and then reconcile that new export with whatever downstream tools used the old data. This gets much worse in the bi-directional case!
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Consider also Zotero: it's native software, but it's designed to manage your papers' files internally. You can export individual PDFs elsewhere, but changes made to that PDF won't be reflected within the app. Contrast this with "Zotero is a viewer for a (nested) folder of PDFs".
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I have this specific problem constantly and haven't found a good workflow!
One neat trick Zotero has (maybe from a plugin?) is that I can export a citation list to a file, and it'll automatically re-export anytime the list changes -- feels more live than typical one-time export
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I really just wish I could access Zotero's metadata-finding and citation-generating bits via cmd line. Then I'd just use nested folders + Alfred.
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Yep, exactly this. A perfect example of where I want smaller composable tools; the metadata slurping is AMAZING but I don't really need any of the other features
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I've thought about finding a way to send Zotero metadata into a Notion table or something, but Notion doesn't really have a good story for annotating PDFs either
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Nothing has a good end-to-end story for PDF annotation, AFAICT!
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This workflow is also the place where the weird iOS file model pains me the most. I save PDFs in iCloud Drive and annotate in PDF Expert on iPad, but I always forget if I'm actually "editing the file" or just creating a new copy. For some papers I have 5+ versions by accident...
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Totally. See also: my reMarkable! 💣
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