Advanced topics

Archiving (version control)

If you have Git installed on your computer, you can choose to have your notebooks archived locally or to another computer using Git. Simple enable the “Archiving” option and specify the place where you want the archive to be stored.

Archiving locally is extremely easy, but of limited utility [1]. Archiving remotely from within NotedELN is slightly more involved. If you have no experience with Git, it is probably best to remedy that first. Some of the following is likely to be hard to understand otherwise.

Warning

Black diamond contents ahead!

For remote archiving, you need to have a host computer that you can access by ssh without a password. Typically, that involves setting up a public/private RSA key pair using ssh-keygen or similar and appending the public key to the file “.ssh/authorized_keys” on the server. Further details can be found elsewhere. In my experience, doing this from a Windows computer is much trickier than from either Linux or Mac OS; the most workable Windows solutions I have found are “Pageant,” which is part of the “PuTTY” package [2], and the unix-style ‘ssh-keygen,” “ssh-agent,” and “ssh-add” that come with recent versions of Git SCM [3].

If you use Git to store your notebook on a remote host, you can also access it from other computers. To do that, you would select “Clone hosted notebook for local use” from the NotedELN opening screen. Conveniently, once you have cloned the notebook, you can treat it just like any other local notebook, with one caveat: you should not open a notebook simultaneously on two computers, and always allow Git to “commit and push” any changes back to the host [4]. Similar cautions apply when you use solutions like Dropbox or iCloud for holding your notebook.

Warning

Double black diamond contents ahead!

It is also possible to turn an existing notebook into a Git repository. There are two steps:

1. You should replace the line in your notebook’s “style.json” file that says “”vc”: “”” to “”vc”: “git””;

2. You should locate the “.nb” folder, type git init to turn your notebook into a Git repository, then type some variant of

   ssh user@host git init --bare somewhere/nice/notebook.nb
   git push -u user@host:somewhere/nice/notebook.nb
   

   to set up the archive host.

Again, if this section doesn’t make sense to you, please first learn about Git version control, then read it again before contacting me. (And yes, I will be happy to assist.)

Customization

At present, you cannot graphically change the looks of a notebook. However, inside each notebook folder, NotedELN creates a file called “style.json” that defines many of the style parameters of the notebook. I don’t have the time right now to document all of them (feel free to contribute). Particularly important ones are “page-width” and “page-height” which specify the width and height of a notebook page in points (1/72”) and the various “…-font-family” variables.

Footnotes

[1]

Unless “locally” actually means a network location that your computer maps to a path that merely “looks” local to NotedELN. Most operating systems are capable of that.

[2]

At https://www.putty.org. See https://documentation.help/PuTTY/pageant.html for an introduction to Pageant.

[3]

An excellent port of Git to Windows. At https://git-scm.com.

[4]

If you fail to heed this warning, NotedELN will likely have to manually rebuild your index and table of contents. That’s not the end of the world. However, in rare instances, your notebook can get into a messy state from which recovery will require typing Git commands in a terminal window. Note that it is always completely safe to only use one client computer with Git at a time.