Handling Annotations/Highlights in ePub documents

Q & A - getting started with Tinderbox
1

Hi all,
This is likely to be known by many but it was news to me. In the following I describe a nice workflow.
In Obsidian, use the plug-in “Apple Books - Import Highlights”. Use ⌘ P, search “Apple Books” and select one or all of your ePub-books that you want the plug-in to work on. Each found Highlight/Annotation will be collected in a block containing;

  • Chapter
  • Context (if supported in the book)
  • Highlight
  • Annotation note (if any)
  • Link to ePub-book original highlight.

The result is collected in a folder “ibooks-highlights” by default. There is a file for each book in the folder.
Moving a book file to Tinderbox and performing an explode on the argument “----” will create a note for each Highlight/Annotation. NOTE, the original file is a Markdown file, so all the notes should be set to Markdown prototype.

2

[To expand a bit for those less familiar with Tinderbox’s Explode feature…]

First ensure the Markdown prototype has been added to your TBX, if not see https://www.acrobatfaq.com/atbref10/index/Misc_User_Interface_Aspects/Built-in_Prototypes.html. Also consider adding the ‘Exploded Notes’ prototype, for reasons seen below.

Now there are two ways to set the desired prototype:

  • In the Explode pop-over dialog, set the Action box to $Prototype="Markdown";, but note the latter code is only remembered until the document is closed.
  • Set the $OnAdd action (via the attribute or using Action Inspector, Action sub-tab) to $Prototype="Markdown";.
    • Note that the Exploded Notes prototype use used for all Explodes, so if you do Explodes for different purposes, this approach may be less useful as all Explode-created notes with get the Markdown prototype.