After short tests, inking, and missing latex/ backlinks, workflow

Dear Bear Team,

after a short test with the new editor, I’d like to summarize. As a disclaimer, I am not currently a bear.app user, but the main application is definitively getting more interesting for me, once the panda features are included! It’s awesome :), thank you for your work!

The main feature for me is the inline inking capabilities, I have not yet found a comparable solution for mixing markdown with handwriting (without opening a separate input window all the times…) - absolutely killer! And I like it a lot!

  • It would be great if one could maybe scale the inking input in all directions, but just nice to have.
  • at the moment my notes regularly get saved as .panda (or someting like that) instead of textbundle, but I installed an automatic unpacking routine on my mac… so not a huge problem.
  • It even seems to work to some extent with obsidian…

Else:

  • for my routine it would be absolutely very helpful if you would be supporting mathjax or katex or another latex engine, as many other markdown editors do, at the moment I need to switch tools in order to be able to do this… (with inline preview, that makes a difference…)
  • in order to be completely functional as a knowledge base it would be extremely helpful to be able to have backlinks (I know this would become manifest not on the editor level, but when including in bear…).

In summary: add latex and backlinks, and you are going to replace many tools as goodnotes or notability and obsidian for many people, of this I am sure.

My current workflow (not really tested, but that’s how I think I should work now, up to issues I will stumple upon for sure):

  • pdf (latex based) highlighting on ipad with highlights app or apple-preview functionality…
  • export highlight outline from highlights → textbundle…
  • (maybe I need to open it in bear first, I am not quite sure)
  • open in panda and add my own pencil input
  • open the finished file in obsidian and:
  • transform textbook / script excerpts with mathpix into latex
  • link notes…
  • in case a handwriting needs edit, open note again in panda…

so quite complicated, and not really tested, I would love to see bear ‘bearing’ all the work after the pdf highlighting step :slight_smile:

if anybody has ideas how to improve my workflow, I would be grateful!
For my field of study (theoretical physics) I need to work with huge pdf files, full of mathematical expressions, but I would love to summarize concepts and to mix the summaries with handwriting and have a html version of my linked knowledge base of a topic, as an end product… with marginnote3 I feel very limited, after I have build my mindmap, I just don’t get a useful output at the end. But if somebody knows how to overcome these things, I wouldn’t mind to go back to marginnote to edit handwriting, if that would be the only remaining issue :).

sorry for any grammar and logical mistakes, it’s getting late

Of course, I would be glad to hear that these points are testable in a beta of the bear app soon, but who doesn’t :wink:

Best regards, an interested beta-user :slight_smile:

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Hi there interested beta-user!

Many thanks for taking the time to leave us a post on here.

I can see that this is your first time posting on the forum, so welcome to the community!

We’re glad to hear that you are liking elements of Panda, and thank you for taking the time to give us some feedback.

Regarding equations support, we don’t have any future plans for LaTex. However, we do have plans for MathJax.

This will be further down the line though as the completion and implementation of the new Editor for Bear is the current priority.

Regarding backlinking, they are something we’re thinking of adding as an option into the info panel.

However, we’re waiting to do this until after it’s migrated from Panda. This is as note links and backlinks will only work for Bear.

Hoping these answers helped, but if you’ve any further queries or questions about Bear let me know!

1 Like