zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Bill Oldroyd <billoldroyd@xxxxxxxxx>]

I have no plans to make the application public because it is not in a 
sufficiently good state at present. This is partly because I decided to 
move it to Python3 and Qt5 and that version is still in the early stages 
due to lack of time. I don't want to start a discussion of an 
application which isn't Zim on a Zim forum. I just wanted to point out 
that in my view switching to Qt is not necessarily easy and if you want 
to do that it is probably best to use the design ideas of Zim to build a 
new application rather than base it on existing code.

I have not considered using the application on a phone or laptop because 
the design is aimed at a desktop. I don't think it would work on a small 
format screen without some significant re-design.

As Zim aims to be a Python application it might be worth looking at the 
Whoosh library to provide Python-based full-text indexing. I found it 
fairly easy to add to my application. Searching data is provided by 
special formatting of text in the notebook page, for example you can 
search by place, date, description etc..

I use the application to build up information about historical 
photographs by creating a notebook page; adding the photograph; creating 
notes to describe the content, origin etc.; assigning keywords; copying 
relevant information and links from the Internet. The long-term aim is 
to have a read-only version that can be used in kiosk mode. A read-only 
version would be the most likely target for a phone or tablet version, 
in which case I would serve the pages as web-pages using HTML5.

Bill

3/03/15 03:03, Matt Bromberg wrote:
> Are you releasing your efforts to the public?
> Can't you link to any note from any other note in zim?  How does this 
> constrain your "hierarchy"?  Are you referring to the directory 
> structure in zim?
>
> Also did the use of Qt actually enable you to create a tablet/phone 
> ready version of your code?
> I ask this because it would be nice to have a successful use case of 
> real cross platform, desktop to tablet, gui development.
>
>
> I'm also curious what kind of data you handle?
> From the note taking point of view and text handling the only thing 
> that's really missing in zim would be a way to handle code syntax with 
> syntax highlighting.
>
> One of the things I love about zim is how easy it is to create cross 
> links to other notes or even empty links to yet to be created notes.
>
> The second thing, which is indispensable, is the ability to handle 
> equations.  I still use kile to enter my latex though because the 
> latex window in zim is a bit cramped.
>
> -Matt
>
> On 03/22/2015 07:31 AM, Bill Oldroyd wrote:
> > I use Zim a little. It is a fine piece of software, but I don't have 
> > a day-to-day need for it. There were features I needed that were not 
> > present - for example handling data, full text searching, pages 
> > appearing in more than one hierarchy.
> >
> > So, for my own use I have written a replacement in Python 2 using the 
> > PyQt4 libraries. Qt has some nice tools for creating a notebook 
> > application, for example QtTextEdit. Likewise QtWebKit allows you to 
> > integrate a browser with the editor. You might wonder why, but data 
> > extraction from one to the other is useful when the notebook 
> > application has direct access to the web page content.
> >
> > It was also easy to include full text indexing using the Whoosh library.
> >
> > In my experience, it would be better to start from scratch on 
> > something similar to Zim rather than trying to migrate the current 
> > code to Qt, though someone who is more familiar with the Zim code 
> > might disagree.
>
>
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