I've asked Claude to build me a few tools, but my new favorite is a macOS droplet that turns macOS Preview PDF highlighted text into a plaintext document like this:
It's written in Python. I used Google Antigravity -- there wasn't much of a prompt. By accident I prematurely submitted something like 'turn every contiguous highlighted text string into a quotes with page number'. It went through some minor revision cycles that simplified the citation reference and added a descriptive header with available metadata. I even made some small changes by hand. (Antigravity burned my free Claude Thinking credits so I started doing more things manually.)
Claude made me a bash script that lets the Python code run as a droplet.
If I open the text file and copy all, then paste into MindNode, I get one quote per node.
I used Claude Thinking with Google Antigravity. I tried Gemini a bit but it is far behind Claude.
I thought about sharing the code for this, but it's ai generated. You could just tell the ai what you want using the above as an example. (The "con-stitutive" is a hard-for-Claude edge case with text wrapping in PDFs.)
Anyway, if anyone wants the code just leave a comment below and I'll put it on my personal web site and add a link here.
Anyway, if anyone wants the code just leave a comment below and I'll put it on my personal web site and add a link here.
