Hi! I’m boisjère from Waterloo, Ontario, Canada (where the Obsidian founders went to school, actually). I’m excited about Logseq because, among all the TfT I see emerging, it seems to be taking PDF integration the most seriously.
It is amazing to me how few tools do this! I fully understand why they don’t want to do this. From what I understand, the PDF file format is a curse. And there are some great PDF annotation tools out there. Marginote, Liquid Text and other start to reach towards this block-based bidirectional linking world, almost. But even the venerable Tinderbox from Eastgate Systems hasn’t made PDF integration a priority. For academics or research-based consultants (I am both), PDF integration is make-or-break.
I also think it’s awesome that Logseq is open-source and committed to developing standards for data exchange. All signs are good. I’m looking forward to learning more.
I’ve been using Logseq since June, and only started using PDF integration this week.
Wow.
I can see my assets folder getting bloated beyond belief with PDFs. I hope there will be a way to view and select all the PDFs we’ve imported over time.
I’m discovering with some consternation that there isn’t a rich subfoldering feature that lets us organize and structure where files sit within the assets and pages folders. No folder hierarchy there. So yes your files are future-proof in the sense that you’ll have them if the tool goes away, but if you have thousands of them in one flat directory, they’ll be a mess to make sense of. But future proofing isn’t actually the main problem. It’s that I use hierarchy to organize my thoughts, as much as linking. I’m really torn here.
Namespaces can create a hierarchy. In Logseq, the title might look like book/chapter1/topic, and the file name will be book.chapter1.topic.md. I knocked a script together to pull in a set of files with one file and one or more folders at the root, copying the files with the new name. If you had to bail into an explicitly hierarchical structure later on, reversing the process would be pretty easy.
I’m seriously considering moving a couple chunks of pages into namespaces. One advantage of that is you can have pages named Intro in more than one namespace, because the file names are still unique.
I haven’t tested this, but I wonder if one could set up subdirectories in assets. Calling an asset is done with a normal Markdown link, so it should work.