I’ve been experimenting with an ideal academic workflow in Logseq, and many of the roadblocks I encountered had to do with PDF annotation. It is important to think not just about getting text into Logseq, but how it is processed later. Having it as a block ref, without selectable text, without a citekey, and without the page number, means that it is hard to further refine your notes or move them on to other apps for long form academic writing. The request is to have a third option in the PDF annotation menu: “Copy text with reference” which would do all three.
(Note: user @bluejaw has made a version of this request as part of a large discussion, but I don’t see it listed as a separate feature request.)
Right now, when you copy a highlight to your graph, you have two options:
- Copy ref
- Copy text
But neither is ideal. Ref text is not editable or selectable, and text does not include a link back to the original text in the PDF. The “copy text with reference” would be a combination. It would be a plain text note but it would have a pin (similar to this request) at the beginning or end of the text with the link ref.
Something like this:
“Consuetudium lectorum Mirum est notare. Eodem modo typi qui nunc nobis videntur parum clari fiant sollemnes in futurum”
[📌](((ref code)))
Ideally, the format could be customized however. In my ideal workflow the quote would also have the [@citekey] used in Zotero so that it is easy to move from Logseq to writing a markdown formatted paper that can be processed with PanDoc to have a full bibliography. (Zettlr is one such app.) Since Logseq is planning on outsourcing Zotero support to a third party plugin, there needs to be some way to allow that plugin to talk to the PDF annotator to modify the notes to include the citekey. (I’ll let someone like @Aryan make a proper feature request for this, since I’m not sure what is needed.)
The full thing might look like this:
[
](((ref code)))
"Consuetudium lectorum Mirum est notare. Eodem modo typi qui nunc nobis videntur parum clari fiant sollemnes in futurum"[{@citekey PAGE}]
Finally, it would also be good to have the page number included along with the citekey. If the app can pull the page numbers from Zotero it can know the starting page number and calculate the actual page. Otherwise it should be possible to set the start page number manually.
With all this in place, one could simply copy an article quote into a Markdown formatted paper and the bibliography and in-text citation would be formatted without having to do any additional steps.
