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SVG Zettelkasten

iylockiylock
in Projects Logs and Journals

I decided to experiment with doing Zettelkasten using SVG.

While I do work with text (such as reading books), my primary fields of application are music and graphics. Using a text editor for this was inconvenient. Therefore, I decided to follow my intuition and create Zettel in SVG. This decision stemmed from the thought I could achieve it while examining mechanical/electrical drawings and process P&ID from a factory. (The drawings include Sheet Numbers, which are used for linking.)

Since handling text in SVG is inefficient, I plan to use a Markdown + SVG hybrid approach for the time being. I will likely try various approaches to find the one that suits me best. If anyone has attempted something similar, I would appreciate any advice you can offer. :smiley:

Comments

  • harrharr
    edited March 21

    @iylock said:
    Markdown + SVG hybrid approach

    I tried embedding SVG code in my Markdown notes. The idea was to have self-contained files. (I used it for draw.io charts.) It looks fine in Obsidian, because Obsdian can render SVG. But the same text files are unpleasant to read with text editors that cannot render SVG.

    So I ended up using SVG like a non-text file.

    • My zettel is a plain text file that only contains human-readable markup and structured data like Markdown, YAML, HTML. The zettel contains the metadata and comments.
    • I keep the graphics in the same directory as the zettel. It helps me find related files with any file browser. And it makes linking easier, because absolute or relative paths can be a mess with some Markdown editors.
    • I link those graphics from the Markdown file. Personally I prefer wikilink notation ![[dog.1]], but Markdown links work also ![](dog.1.svg).
    • The difficult part is naming the image files. I ended up with the notename.1.png and notename.17.svg for images that belong to notename.md.

    So the files look like this:

    cat.md
cat.1.png
cat.2.svg
cat.3.svg
cat.4.jpg
dog.md
dog.1.svg
tiger-2021-has-stripes.md
tiger-2021-has-stripes.1.pdf

    Not pretty, but it's scalable and works with many apps and file browsers.

  • MartinMartin

    We had a similar discussion here a while ago: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/670/visualising-links-between-zettels-with-keyboard-maestro-and-graphviz. Nice to see it updated.

  • andang76andang76

    Very interesting idea.

    I’ve always thought that the principles of the Zettelkasten can be successfully applied to other domains as well, by changing the expressive tools or mediums and going beyond text alone.
    I think there are interesting paths to explore using graphics, images, or even in the field of music, where relationships between elements can be just as rich and meaningful.

    Unfortunately, there’s very little out there on this topic, so one has to be a bit of a pioneer in exploring these directions.

  • harrharr

    The thread about visual note-taking might be of interest: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/2200/anybody-using-visual-note-taking-and-zettelkasten-would-love-to-hear-your-experience

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