This is a collection of templates for exporting notes from Skim.app the open source PDF reader and note-taker for Mac OS X.
This template exports all annotations into a single HTML file to create a kind of summary of the text. The notes are color-coded; highlights are yellow, free-text and anchored notes are green, and everything else (circles, boxes, strike-outs, underlines, lines and freehand drawings) are red, to indicate they won't necessarily make much sense, unless you have annotated them with descriptive text.
Each note is displayed in a blockquote element with a cite element containing its page number (or page index). Each blockquote element has a title-attribute containing the name of the note type, which is displayed as a tooltip on hover in most browsers.
The title of the original PDF-file in the heading is a link, so provided you haven't moved the original file, you can click this link to open the file.
Install a template by placing it in ~/Library/Application Support/Skim/Templates (where ~ is your home folder), creating this last folder if it does not yet exist.
From within Skim.app you can then select File > Export... and the template(s) will then be available from the File Format dropdown menu.
If you want to edit any of the templates or create your own, you will find the templating language documented on the Skim wiki.
Any plain text formatted templates can be edited directly, and if you are comfortable editing raw HTML and CSS, you can edit the .html-templates directly as well. For easier editing, however, I recommend working with the included .haml source files.
Check out the Haml and Sass documentation and you will quickly be able to grok the structure of the file. Haml and Sass significantly simplify HTML and CSS markup, respectively, and especially Haml's auto-closing of tags makes editing HTML much easier and less error-prone.
To convert your edited .haml-file to HTML, first install the Haml gem if you haven't already by running this command in Terminal.app, typing your password when prompted:
sudo gem install haml
Then navigate to the folder containing your .haml-file on the command-line (optionally install cdto to quickly open a Finder folder in Terminal.app) and convert it via the haml command-line utility:
haml input.haml output.html
So for instance:
haml "Notes as HTML.haml" "Notes as HTML.html"
(Note the added quotation marks because the filenames contain spaces).
These templates are released under the MIT License, so hack away, sailor!
Copyright (c) 2009 Dan Andrew Brendstrup
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