I understand that later this month Liquidtext from https://www.liquidtext.net/ will release their MacOS version. Their iPad app has existed for years and I will be purchasing the desktop version as well. This app allows for deep reading and thinking of PDFs.
Will you provide compatibility if that is at all possible?
Thanks for asking , @haberjr
I’ve been in touch with the dev and we’ll see what they say re linkability. Preview, Adobe Reader and PDFPenPro worked out of the box. Skim only needed a bit of extra AppleScript. Hopefully they will provide the minimal automation support needed.
Hi, i downloaded the app, which only works on macOS 10.15. It has no AppleScript/ JavaScript support. So Hook or similar tools can’t automatically get the file title and URL, at least not at this point.
In their notes, you can paste links in directly from Hook or other apps that have Copy Link, like OmniFocus , Things and Drafts , but they are not pasted as hyperlinks. (Similarly, if you paste formatted text, the formatting is lost. ) Still, you can paste links in there, and when you need them, you can copy the links again and then paste them in Spotlight or a launcher.
I only briefly used it. Didn’t have a “new project” function. I couldn’t find its project files. Are they stored in a database? as files in iCloud ? If so one might be able to get hook://file links straight from Finder.
I couldn’t find any Reveal File in Finder .
Do they have expose a URL scheme on the iOS side?
it also crashed a couple of times, so I didn’t get very far.
anyway, I’ve been in touch with the dev regarding the possibility of an API.
Thank you for staying on top of this. I just purchased my copy and already wrote to the developers I like to see compatibility with Hook. I will investigate their filing system. With the iPad version, you can choose to save your annotations in the original PDF file, so I can link to that. I will explore how this works on the Mac version.
Liquidtext has issued a stability update. On my Mac it has been stable. You can open any pdf in Liquidtext by right clicking on a pdf and choose Liquidtext and then make annotations in the workspace, or highlight text. I did ask them to explore compatibility with Hook and will from time to time check-in with them.
Have they ever responded? It would be wonderful if they made the changes that would enable Hook to work with their app.
We received a canned reply on June 17, 2020. We’ve sent them another email linking to this post. Please feel free to add your voice to them: Contacting Developers of Other Apps and Information for Developers – Hook.
LiquidText has a by invitation user forum, where I have been trying to get them to engage on the issue of deep linking. As here, their response has been crickets. Today I posted the following, along with a link to this thread.
When invited to join this [the LiquidText] forum it was after chatting with someone in support at LiquidText about the issue of deep linking. Unfortunately LT developers seem disinclined to engage on the subject, which is a shame. Although it is not new. I just ran across this on the community forum for Hook about LiquidText’s failure to respond when contacted directly by another developer.
I suppose that I shouldn’t hold my breath now hoping that the LiquidText folk will engage in the conversation. The thread here ended in June 2020 with the following:
“We received a canned reply [from LiquidText] on June 17, 2020. We’ve sent them another email linking to this post.”
Come on, guys. I assume that you read your own forum. If you aren’t interested in deep linking and don’t plan to do anything about it, just come out and say so. Just say, “we have no intention of supporting deep linking,” and then those of us who need it can at least be about our business knowing what to expect. Please?
I would love to be able to turn up the heat until LiquidText actually says something. Deep linking would turn LiquidText from Kindle-on-steroids into a truly powerful application. The frustrating thing is that LiquidText is all about the power of being able to link things together… so long, I suppose, as the things that you are trying to link don’t extend beyond the boundaries of their own app. :-/
Very good news on this front. LiquidText just released an update with bidirectional deep linking in a custom URL scheme. I look forward to seeing it show up on Hook’s list of supported apps.
Glad to hear that! Thanks for sharing the information. 
LiquidText has a Copy Link function which yields a deep link. It’s not available yet via automation. The title of the link is the doc name and page number of deep link. There is no document ID information in the URL, so if you were to hook that link to something else, and then reinvoke Hook on a slightly different selection, the Hook window would not show the previously created Hook. Hook (or any other software) has no way of knowing that the two URLs point to the same document (except perhaps heuristically based on file name).
With these limitations in mind, users are welcome to use the following Get Address script for LiquidText:
set the clipboard to ""
tell application "LiquidText"
activate
end tell
tell application "System Events"
tell process "LiquidText"
click menu item "Copy Link" of menu 1 of menu bar item "Edit" of menu bar 1
delay 0.1
repeat 10 times -- poll clipboard for ~2.5 seconds. Sometimes set x to the clipboard throws exception
try
set fp to the clipboard
if fp is not equal to "" then
exit repeat
end if
end try
delay 0.1
end repeat
end tell
end tell
get fp
Due to the limitations I mentioned above, we will not build this into Hook.
Another approach is to simply use their UI to Copy Link and use Hook to Copied Link on the other document, wherever you want the deep links to be hooked. So when you invoke Hook on the other side, you would see one deep link per link you’ve hooked.
@jhester et al., We’ve published the first round of Using Hook with LiquidText:
There’s a … button to get the URL of the current document (I hadn’t noticed it earlier, Craig Tashman of LiquidText pointed it out to me). So it is possible to hook stuff to an entire LiquidText document/project, just requires more steps.
Currently, the Copy Link function yields a deep link. But the deep link does not contain the document ID, so we can’t automatically aggregate all the hooks to a current document. However, if you copy the document link and Focus on Link in Clipboard then you can do it.
The help page explains it a bit. There are a couple of annotated screenshots in there, but a video would help.
I’m hopeful that we’ll see tighter integration between Hook and LiquidText.
Fantastic. Good to hear! I’ve been scripting it, but am glad to hear it’s now supported by Hook. I suspect that the users of both apps will discover a lot of power in the combination.