NoteParse

no working demo

Inspiration

My messy notes and time spent organizing things. A process I felt could be automated and built upon to easily generate study materials so I could spend my time actually learning content instead of organizing it.

What it would do

A tool that takes a document or powerpoint presentation in ODF or other document formats and pulls important information from them. This would predominantly be used for organizing notes and generating notes from class powerpoints or personal text files. It would find vocab, main ideas, steps, question, etc using a modifiable config file where you could specify, for instance, how a vocab word is formatted (ie bolded, word - … and so on). Then using the pulled data it generates study guides, flashcards, or quizzes.

How I built it

some light research into .odf manipulation java libraries
learning how to get the newest version of eclipse on ubuntu (old ver in repos)
learning how to configure libraries in eclipse
actually getting the correct libraries and those library dependencies
planning code with some outlining of features,
planning the process and a TODO for version 1.0
created specification doc with some class file definitions
began coding and hit the challenge below

Challenges I ran into

I couldn't figure out a way to pull text from a .odt document while tracking formatting of the text.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I actually got a project off the ground and out of just a planning stage
started a project from scratch and incorporated other peoples work and built upon it

What I learned

installing eclipse on ubuntu
configuring libraries in eclipse
next time need to plan, i just started coding before I really hashed out data flow
next time need to do more research beforehand