Reading is never really only reading, at least to me. It comes with an arsenal of cerebral processes— analysis, deduction, deconstruction… the usual lot. And, it is of paramount importance to me that I retain my thoughts and mood of those times. Hence, my emphasis on how much metadata I can store in the annotations I collect from a bvolved about the same annotation. I want to refer to them with as much accuracy as I can get.

As you may already know if you are a Boox device user, the text annotation exports they provide are subpar. And the developers surely have other priorities. What I really needed was to colour-code and export those annotations with that data about colours so that I can contextualise them even when I just highlighted, but have not written a note about it.

Since there's no native way to do that in NeoReader, I, by far, have attempted to remedy the situation. The first way was to put special symbols to denote. For example, for thought-provoking highlights. You can find that implementation here. These symbols, along with an Obsidian Templater template, can do the trick. But it is not very ergonomic to do so. You have to put a symbol for every highlight, tiring, really. The second implementation can use the colours, but you will need Tampermonkey to make it work. Still, it is better because you do that once for a book. Much less cumbersome than putting a symbol on every highlight.

My third and by far the best approach is to create an Android app to do so. Let me introduce:

And, it is understandably a better option for several reasons:

1. It works for multiple formats: JSON, CSV, and `text``
2. The template for text is customizable. So, you can be really creative with it.
3. It doesn't depend on elaborate setups like setting up a template or Tampermonkey script.
4. And it integrates with everything nicely. Both JSON and CSV are easy to import or program anywhere. You can customise the text format to your needs to get exactly what you want, to an extent.

How?

Let's say you want your notes to be formatted as the example Provided at the end of this post. It maps your highlight colours to a specific notion you had about them. For example, I use the colour 'green' for things I find thought-provoking.

If you download and run the app, you will be presented with a list of books, only if you have made any text annotations there. Just like this:

The default format you will get at this point is JSON. If you press the share or the save button, they will share or save as JSON. If you want that, well… you just got it!

But, if you want a richly formatted text to store in Obsidian, you may want to go to the preferences:

Select Text as your preferred format, and then click Edit Template. You will find yourself with an editor like this:

It already comes with a decent template. But I haven't added callouts to it by default because that is an Obsidian-specific feature. So, copy this as raw and paste it into this editor and save the template:

---
title: "{{ book.title }}"
aliases: ["Notes from {{ book.title }}"]
author: "{{ book.authors }}"
totalPages: {{ book.totalPages }}
totalAnnotations: {{ annotations | length }}
bookFormat: "{{ book.format }}"
exportedAt: "{{ book.exportedAt | date('dd MMM yyyy hh:mm:ss a') }}"
---
# {{ book.title }}
##### {{ book.authors }}

{%- set prevChapter = "" %}
{%- for annotation in annotations %}
{%- if annotation.chapter != prevChapter %}

## {{ annotation.chapter }}
{%- set prevChapter = annotation.chapter %}
{%- endif %}
### Page: {{ annotation.pageNumber }}{% if book.totalPages %} ({{ (annotation.pageNumber / book.totalPages * 100) | round(2) }}%){% endif %} @ {{ annotation.createdAt | date("dd MMM yyyy hh:mm:ss a") }}

{{ annotation.quote }}

{%- set calloutType = "quote" %}
{%- set calloutTitle = "Quotable/Concept/General Idea" %}
{%- if annotation.color == "#f0ff00" %}
{%- set calloutType = "quote" %}
{%- set calloutTitle = "Quotable/Concept/General Idea" %}
{%- elseif annotation.color == "#00aaff" %}
{%- set calloutType = "important" %}
{%- set calloutTitle = "Striking/Intense" %}
{%- elseif annotation.color == "#ffc1c3" %}
{%- set calloutType = "danger" %}
{%- set calloutTitle = "In Discord" %}
{%- elseif annotation.color == "#00b036" %}
{%- set calloutType = "question" %}
{%- set calloutTitle = "Thought Provoking" %}
{%- elseif annotation.color == "#008000" %}
{%- set calloutType = "sceptic" %}
{%- set calloutTitle = "Sceptic" %}
{%- elseif annotation.color == "#ffaa00" %}
{%- set calloutType = "warning" %}
{%- set calloutTitle = "Unsound" %}
{%- elseif annotation.color == "#ee00ff" %}
{%- set calloutType = "stylish" %}
{%- set calloutTitle = "Stylish" %}
{%- endif %}

> [!{{ calloutType }}] {{ calloutTitle }}{% if annotation.note %}{% set noteLen = annotation.note | length %}{% if noteLen <= 50 %}: {{ annotation.note }}{% else %}
> {{ annotation.note }}{% endif %}{% endif %}

{% endfor %}

You may have already noticed that there are some custom callouts. So, you can drop this in a CSS file (e.g. callouts.css) and add it as a css snippet in your Obsidian:

.callout[data-callout="stylish"] {
  --callout-color: var(--color-purple-rgb);
  --callout-icon: lucide-brush;
}


.callout[data-callout="sceptic"] {
  --callout-color: 107, 142, 35;
  --callout-icon: lucide-message-circle-question;
}

And that's it. Now you can press the save button beside any book and get a well-formatted markdown that you can store directly in your Obsidian, like the example below!

Example