Concatenation

Due to the limitations of the PDF format, creating highlights spanning two or more pages is rather complicated. Similar to Readwise's solution on this problem, this package supports the concatenation of highlights utilizing comments.

Concatenation IDs

To connect two or more highlights, the comments of these highlights must start with the identifiers .c1, .c2, and so on. The order of the identifiers must coincide with the order of display of the highlights themselves: left to right, top-down within one page, and in ascending order of pages otherwise.

Example: highlight with the text "Hello" and the comment ".c1 General" on page 1, a highlight with the text "there!" and the comment ".c2 Kenobi" on page 2. Concatenation result: highlight with the text "Hello there!" and the comment "General Kenobi".

Word hyphenation

Concatenation does some magic under the hood. It removes concatenation identifiers (even if the chain consists of one highlight) and also connects hyphenated words.

Example: highlight with the text "Mine-" and the comment ".c1" on page 1, a highlight with the text "craft" and the comment ".c2" on page 2. Concatenation result: highlight with the text "Minecraft" and an empty comment.

The keyword

The import_highlights function uses concatenation by default. Functions for getting pieces containing the words highlights, comments, or pages in their name support the keyword concatenate.

Example without concatenation:

get_highlights_comments(pdf; concatenate = false)

(["Highlight 1", "Highlight 2", "Highlight 3", "High-", "light 4", "Highhighlight 5", "6th Highhigh light-", "High light 7", "8th Highlight-"], ["Comment 1", ".c1 Comment 2", ".c2 Comment 3", ".c1 Comment 4", ".c2", "", "", "", ""])

Example with concatenation:

get_highlights_comments(pdf)

(["Highlight 1", "Highlight 2 Highlight 3", "Highlight 4", "Highhighlight 5", "6th Highhigh light-", "High light 7", "8th Highlight-"], ["Comment 1", "Comment 2 Comment 3", "Comment 4", "", "", "", ""])

where pdf is the path to the PDF used by this package in the tests.