About "good order list" of things to read for beginners

WAKAMATSU · June 9, 2020, 11:38am

Dear Mr.Mark Anderson,
I am delighted to report that with wkhtmltopdf v0.12.5, Jankelevitch Manual, using PDF Expert.app to the following additional effect [–zoom 0.9 --disable-smart-shrinking]&[ --toc-text-size-shrink 0.9] come within an inch of desired display list.
（both digitize size should be identical in order that 0.8 ~ 0.9)
If I simply by changing [–zoom 1.0] , long sentences are interrupted on the extreme right.

wkhtmltopdf --outline --page-size “A4” --zoom 0.9 --disable-smart-shrinking --footer-spacing 4 --print-media-type --footer-center “[page] of [topage]” --footer-font-name “Helvetica Neue” --footer-font-size 11 --footer-line --footer-spacing 5 --header-spacing 5 --header-line --header-center “Jankelevitch Manual” --header-font-name “Helvetica Neue” --enable-toc-back-links toc --enable-toc-back-links --toc-header-text “Jankelevitch Manual - Table of Contents” --toc-text-size-shrink 0.9 --toc-level-indentation 4em “LaMusiqueEtIneffabl-proc.html” “Jankelevitch Manual-11.pdf”

I will take a delight in doing With wkhtmltopdf v0.12.6, on the weekend.
Yours sincerely, WAKAMATSU

mwra · June 9, 2020, 12:11pm

Happiness! Your persistence has paid off. These command line tools can take some tinkering, but i’m really happy to know this now works for you. Doubtless, when v0.12.6 comes out we will all be changing our scripts again.

It is useful to remember that there are two parts to this process. Most can we done in the Tinderbox export with the exception of the ‘sed’ command line I posted above. Once exported from Tinderbox and that command is run it is likely other HTML → PDF tools may work, if you have them. There are things like Prince which cost $$$, but some people may have access, e.g. via a University library or similar.

Thank you for sharing your progress with us.

ClaudeB · June 9, 2020, 2:30pm

As a native frenchman I’d be glad to help with the french translation.

WAKAMATSU · June 22, 2020, 10:29am

Dear Dr. Mark Anderson,
How are you getting on?
I am delighted to report that, about apply to wkhtmltox-0.12.6.
Today, I download wkhtmltox-0.12.6-2.macos-cocoa.pkg,
finally start to make “Jankelevitch Manual-35.pdf”.
As the result :
Without [–zoom] , pdf file is too small font-size for an accurate diagnosis.
–zoom 1.8 : Too small body text
–zoom 2.5 : suitably sized
–zoom 2.5 --disable-smart-shrinking ：seem worth a try, as-yet faceless
Applicable condition :
Using [ sed ] is same old routine. Under OSX Mojave (10.14.6)

wkhtmltopdf --outline --page-size “A4” --zoom 2.5 --footer-spacing 4 --print-media-type --footer-center “[page] of [topage]” --footer-font-name “Helvetica Neue” --footer-font-size 11 --footer-line --footer-spacing 5 --header-spacing 5 --header-line --header-center “Jankelevitch Manual” --header-font-name “Helvetica Neue” --enable-toc-back-links toc --enable-toc-back-links --toc-header-text “Jankelevitch Manual - Table of Contents” --toc-text-size-shrink 1 --toc-level-indentation 4em “LaMusiqueEtIneffabl-proc.html” “Jankelevitch Manual-35.pdf”
To the following effect :

Yours sincerely, WAKAMATSU kunimitsu

mwra · June 22, 2020, 11:00am

Well done! I’m so happy it worked and to see an example of the technique being used for content other than the Help file.

I’m also reminded to update my wkhtmltopdf to v0.12.6 (now done). It is easier now recent versions have a normal macOS installer.

Thanks for sharing your example with us, which may hopefully help others wanting to try out the process.

tkt028 · October 14, 2021, 11:37am

Dear WAKAMATSU,
I am interested in “La Musique et l’Ineffable.tbx”.
I would like to learn how you structure the information.

Thank you very much!
Cheers,
Khon

WAKAMATSU · October 14, 2021, 1:26pm

Dear Khon,
Thank you very much for your interest in my tbx.
I am not sure what you mean by “how you structure the information” in your question.
I just followed the table of contents of “La Musique et l’Ineffable”
and picked up some things what I did not know.
I am just following the subject of this book by Jankélévitch.
I just took out one thing at a time that I did not understand
and summarized it as an item.
The philosopher and musician Jankélévitch is far beyond the scope of what I learned in Europe.
Bergson is one of my teacher of philosophy.
Bergson and Jankélévitch may have been acquaintances of Marcel MOYSE, my music teacher.
I also wanted to compare and examine the culture of my teacher’s generation.
At the same time, I wanted to compare and investigate.
I was concerned that the Japanese translation did not reflect the French content very accurately, so I decided to rewrite half of it.
I have picked up an overview of the musicians from WiKi. The musical content was examined by collecting and analyzing the scores of the works cited whenever possible.
Thx and regards, WAKAMATSU
P.S
Where does your cultural background come from?

tkt028 · October 16, 2021, 4:18pm

Dear WAKAMATSU,
Thank you very much for the very details! You are very kind and open.
I am also very grateful to this forum community which is so great with so many generous people sharing different guidelines, tips and template starters.
About me, I am a software engineer and live in Vietnam. And I am a newcomer to this community. Beside the technical topics, I am also interested in history, economics market and Buddhism.

Personally, I realized my limits in term of body, energy, time, constraints, but so many things I want to read, grasp, do and achieve. To complement the physical limits, I have been searching for different kinds of support systems to realize the “Memex” (later, I learned the term “hypertext” in this community) or Knowledge Management System which I usually call it.

I found that Tinderbox is a very “precious device” that I have been seeking, beside my current toolbox of emacs and org-mode, DEVONthink, Curio and fzf (for indexing/searching my ideas in org-mode text files). Tinderbox helps me capture the atomic thoughts at runtime effectively, connect them perfectly over time and gradually produce higher stories and patterns. I am still a beginner of learning and integrating Tinderbox into my workflows.

I am quite satisfied with Tinderbox, my current toolbox and workflows to help organize information in the “mechanical-level” processes (taking notes, read/write/query/aggregation, analysis/synthesis). However, I would like to learn the “mental part” of reading process how professional people identify “what matters” via data sources (books, news, etc.) according to their priority and value system. I believe effective readers don’t just simply consume information in one direction, but have a two-way conversation with the book content (authors’ thought) in which the readers might develop some controlling questions, mental models and search criteria while digesting and internalizing the book contents.

In short, I would like to learn the “art” how professional/effective readers in other fields (e.g. musical, philosophy) use Tinderbox in their reading process by looking at their real Tinderbox documents. Please feel free to say “no” if the document is private to you.

Thank you very much!
Yours respectfully,
Khon

WAKAMATSU · October 17, 2021, 2:56am

Dear Khon,
Thank you very much for your information about fzf.
I would like to try it to index ideas in org-mode text files.
I am currently using Emacs 27 as spacemacs27 and using org-roam for diary-like notes.
I have been using Peronal Brain (now renamed The Brain) for many years, so I am familiar with org-roam-ui.
I have been trying to port my LaTeX files stored in Emacs to Tinderbox.

Mr. Paul Walters gave me some advice in this column.
Quote Above:
Respectfully, though, I suggest you will learn more by creating your own personal manual
(in Tinderbox of course) than translating whole books, sites, or other manuals. other manuals.

La Musique et l’Ineffable.tbx is a personal manual for understanding Jankélévitch,
so unfortunately I am keeping it private.
Please understand that it is not available to the public.
Also, aTbRef-8.tbx into Japanese is no longer of much use to me.
The reason is as Dr. Mark Anderson pointed out, aTbRef source TBX can be read in any foreign language as a native language because it can be translated by Google Translate.
(I do not want discuss the mistranslation of google translation here).
If you have any questions about Mr. Jankélévitch, not only about “La Musique et l’Ineffable”,
please contact me.
Sincerely yours, WAKAMATSU（From Japanese over 70 years old）

tkt028 · October 19, 2021, 8:16am

Dear WAKAMATSU,
Thank you for your informative details.
About the fzf, I usually have the org-mode headings to contain taggers (like hashtag, but instead of starting withh ‘#’, my choice was ‘@’), contextual information, or even any Curio/DEVONthink/Tinderbox/Google Doc/etc URL in one-line. By this way, I can use Linux commands like grep to collect all org-mode headings in multiple org-mode text files into one place and feed into fzf for search/query. The fzf command serves as a top-layer query interface that quickly leads me to other applications (DEVONthink, Curio, Google Doc, etc.) or the original location of the org-mode entries. I am also thinking of export the Tinderbox notes (headline only with some contextual information) into org-mode entries so I could query all data in one single interface. This task is on my list now.

About Mr. Paul Walters’s advice of creating personal manual of Tinderbox, that’s very nice idea! I am currently running that path.

About “La Musique et l’Ineffable”, I understand it. No worry!

Thank you very much for your kindness!
Yours respectfully,
Khon

WAKAMATSU · October 20, 2021, 8:17am

Dear Khon Trieu,
Yesterday, I got fzf via Homebrew.
I am going to learn how to use it a bit.
You use Linux commands like grep to collect all org-mode headings in multiple org-mode text files into one place and feed into fzf for search/query.
How about
[[Searching for a note across several folders and or files (XQuery + Keyboard Maestro) - External Scripting of Tinderbox - Tinderbox Forum]]

Thx and regards, WAKAMATSU

tkt028 · October 23, 2021, 10:48am

Dear WAKAMATSU,
Sorry for my late reply.

I got fzf via Homebrew.

Very nice to hear it! If you have any trouble of collecting/indexing your Emacs org-mode headings (ideas/notes), please let me know your problems, I could support or share some scripts.

[[Searching for a note across several folders and or files (XQuery + Keyboard Maestro) - External Scripting of Tinderbox - Tinderbox Forum]]

And many thanks for the pointer. It’s very useful for me to extract/search notes of Tinderbox documents and feed into my fzf system.

Yours respectfully,
Khon

WAKAMATSU · March 22, 2024, 2:35am

Dear Khon Trieu(tkt028),
It’s been quite a while since I posted on the Tinderbox Forum.
How are you spending your time at the moment?
Now, regarding this post, when you use tzf on Tinderbox,
What kind of work do you do?
What kind of usage do you recommend?
I would appreciate it if you could teach me how to use it.

The usage environment on Mac has changed significantly.
Currently Mac Studio M1 OS Ventura13.6.5
Tinderbox 9.6.1
fzf–0.48.1.arm64_ventura
Yours respectfully, WAKAMATSU
P.S.
Japanese version of Mellel 6 (ver.6.0.3)
I plan to retire from helping after the project is completed.

tkt028 · April 7, 2024, 7:37am

Dear Wakamatsu,

Thank you for revisiting this topic (after two years). Very surprised and interesting!

(Q) Why did I use fzf together with Tinderbox?
ANSWER: it’s about searching across Tinderbox documents, searching data across different applications (other apps, not just Tinderbox).

My other apps and data sources:

org-mode heading entries in text files.
Some links to Google Doc, Google Slide
Some link to DEVONthink, Curio documents,
some other apps’ documents that I want to bookmark and search later.

I need “one single search interface” (that is fzf) that
I could manage my search-data (I decide what data to bookmark) and search across many apps.

My implementation
I maintain a text file called “my-bookmark.txt”,
Each line covers two parts: (1) a technical information and (2) a purpose information. In my convention, those are separated by “;;” (see below example)
The idea is that: in the future, when I want to search for (1) technical information, I just type and search for keywords in the part (2) “purpose information”.

An example of my bookmark text file:

// some Linux commands
ps aux grep java ;; (this is Linux command) ps aux - list all Linux processes and filter
firewall-cmd --get-active-zones ;; query the active zones

// links to Google Drive, Google Doc
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1beIVBL0tk4fTfstNQjXXXXXX ;; @story, @lesson - Team work, Tortoise and Hare, Turtle and Rabbit
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1beIVBL0tk4fTfstNQjYYYYYY ;; Important principles in domain XYZ

// links to some other MacOS apps (e.g. DEVONthink)
x-devonthink-item://294E54F9-BC60-428F-AE89-XXXXXXXX ;; Third-party services (electricity, water, plumbing, house, etc.

// these are summary of my Tinderbox nodes which are automatically generated (by my bash script) from Tinderbox file “tbx-@tech.tbx” (this automation is feasible because Tinderbox document is in XML structure)
$TBX_DIR/tbx-@tech.tbx ;; - [Name] Multi-tenant SaaS database tenancy patterns - [mFzfAnchor] @issue#4b9f30 - [NoteID] 1637216463 - @tbx4fzf
$TBX_DIR/tbx-@tech.tbx ;; - [Name] Human Computer Interaction - Design Principles - [mFzfAnchor] @d#17948c - [NoteID] 1637037851 - @tbx4fzf

// here, any information (in any app) I want to bookmark for later search

When I am in a Tinderbox document, I want to bookmark “a node”, there are two ways:

(Way 1) I can manually copy the URL to that node and paste into my bookmark file and add the purpose information of that node. This is a simple solution with manual effort.
(Way 2) I added a special field (as a code) in Tinderbox node that later, I could use a custom bash script to generate the content “URL and purpose” and add to my bookmark file. This requires an automation script (Python, bash, etc.), but I don’t recommend this way because of complexity.

When searching, I just open the command fzf which consumes the content of my bookmark file, it shows the below search interface:

In summary, I rely on fzf

To search my notes across Tinderbox documents
To search my notes across many applications

This is my past implementation.

LIMIT: However, I am not satisfied with this approach yet (though I still use it for past data), because sometimes I want to have a kind of visual interface in which I can search and navigate the relationship between my notes and documents (across many applications).

My current implementation: to overcome that limit,
I replace my combo “bookmark file + fzf” by
the software TheBrain in which it offers a visual interface for search and navigating my notes of different apps and documents.

This screenshot is about my notes on studying Buddhism.

You might to get its overview at this youtube TheBrain 101.

Please let me know if there are any questions.
Best regards,
Khon

WAKAMATSU · April 8, 2024, 2:23pm

Dear Khon Trieu(tkt028),
Thank you for your reply.（It was a long two years.）
Thank you for posting images using TheBrain about Buddhist sects.
Coincidentally, today, April 8th, is Buddha’s birthday.

May I ask you a question?
Are you using emacs?
In the information of apps other than Tinderbox org-mode is available.
Why do you use org-mode but not emacs’ org-roam?
If you use org-roam-ui, wouldn’t it be possible to see the whole thing by arranging graphs like in TheBrain?

I use spacemacs (ver.0.999.0@28.2), that is emacs 28.2, as Spacemacs.
Recently I stopped compiling LaTeX and started using org-mode , org-roam and org-roam-ui. Sometimes I use ox-hugo to export to a static site I’m checking my documents.
You are conducting a comprehensive study using Brain.app.
This is an app that I have been using ever since it was called Personal Brain (ver.4).
However, since around 2000, they stopped using “export for sites’’ and changed the name to “TheBrain” and since then I have used it less frequently.
After seeing your post this time, I started using TheBrain.app again.
Next time, let’s post an image of the file that says “the meaning of music” that I wrote down on TheBrain.
Thx and regards, WAKAMATSU

dominiquerenauld · April 9, 2024, 9:02am

Recently I stopped compiling LaTeX and started using org-mode , org-roam and org-roam-ui.

Dear Wakamatsu,
Did you try RStudio? It’s an easy way to combine Markdown and LaTex. I’ve been using it for years now: its export compatibilities with Word simplify extremely my workflow.

WAKAMATSU · April 9, 2024, 11:36am

Dear Mr. Dominique Renauld,

I have learned a lot from your posts on the Tinderbox Forum.
Thanks a lot.
Unfortunately, I have not touched RStudio recently.

When I purchased Mac Studio late last year, I deleted RStudio (ver.2023),
R.app ver.4.3.0 is still available in my application folder.
Recently, LaTeX uses Visual Studio Code (ver.1.87.2) or
I use BBEdit (ver.15.0.2) or Sublime Text (ver.4164).
Emacs 28.2 (Spacemacs), which I am familiar with, reduces compilation with LaTeX.
To avoid the complexity of saving files with org-roam and org.
I have saved LaTeX files in a completely different location.
This prevents the number of call keys from increasing.

I will also try converting markdown from RStudio to Word format.

Here is a different topic.
Exporting in Emacs org-mode export via pandoc has a function called “to docx and open”.
Do you never use it?
(Of course, this question assumes that you are using Emacs.)

In R Markdown, just specify word_document as the output of YAML front matter,
I can create reports in MS Word DOCX format.
I will do a little research and then try it.
Thank you once again for this proposal.
Yours, WAKAMATSU (from Japan)
P.S
I just downloaded RStudio-2023.12.1-402.dmg.

dominiquerenauld · April 10, 2024, 2:20pm

Thank you for your answer! I don’t use Emacs: if it reduces LaTex compilation, that’s the main thing.
Greetings from France.

abijaoui · April 12, 2024, 10:56pm

It sounds like you’ve been facing some challenges with using the Tinderbox app, especially due to the lack of a Japanese version of the manual. It’s understandable how frustrating and limiting this can be, especially when trying to fully grasp the functionalities of the app.

Translating aTbRef-8.tbx into Japanese is a commendable initiative to help bridge this gap for Japanese users. While translating, you might find it helpful to prioritize the content based on what beginners would benefit from the most. Here’s a suggested “good order list” of things to read for beginners:

Introduction to TinderBox: Start with an overview of what Tinderbox is and its main features. This section should provide a broad understanding of the app’s purpose and capabilities.
Basic Navigation and Interface: Familiarize users with the layout and navigation within the app. Explain where to find different tools and how to move around effectively.
Creating and Managing Notes: Guide users through the process of creating and organizing notes within TinderBox. Cover basic note properties and how to customize them.
Attributes and Prototypes: Introduce the concept of attributes and prototypes, which are fundamental to organizing and structuring data in Tinderbox. Explain how to define attributes and apply prototypes to notes.
Links and Relationships: Explore the various ways notes can be connected and linked together in Tinderbox. Show how to create and manage links to establish relationships between notes.
Views and Visualizations: Discuss different views and visualization options available in TinderBox, such as maps, outlines, and charts. Explain how to customize views to display information effectively.
Exporting and Sharing: Cover methods for exporting Tinderbox data and sharing it with others. Include tips for integrating TinderBox with other tools and platforms.
Advanced Topics (Optional): For users looking to delve deeper into Tinderbox, provide resources on more advanced topics such as agents, rules, and scripting.

By following this suggested order, beginners can gradually build their understanding of Tinderbox’s functionality and become more proficient users over time. Additionally, providing clear explanations and practical examples in the Japanese manual will greatly enhance its usability and effectiveness as a learning resource. Good luck with your translation efforts, and I hope this list proves helpful!

mwra · April 12, 2024, 11:08pm

[please forgive some light admin-editing of the above as Tinderbox is—perhaps unfashionably—written ‘Tinderbox’ rather than ‘TinderBox’. But, whatever, it is ‘Tinderbox’.

I’ve not seen aTbRef in Japanese but if someone has please post a link to it. For myself, I fear I am monoglot: only English … and a bit of American.

Whilst I’ve added a Google Translate widget to all pages, feedback I’ve had from speakers of several other languages is that for all the cleverness of LLMS, AI is better for finding cheap local takeaway food than meaningful translation of technical writing. How disappointing.

Still, I’d note that if anyone wants to translate aTbRef, the source TBX file is on the forum and it is all under a Creative Commons Licence which should not restrict a translation.