KnolCase

Clipboard

The clipboard is used for many things in KnolCase besides coping and pasting text. You can cut, copy and paste topics between folders. When editing a topic, you can copy and paste statements, properties, and values. You can also add pictures to topics using the clipboard. KnolCase has a number of plug-ins that can be activated by pasting URLs into the search box or a topic, letting you import information from other sites or applications in a quick and easy manner.

Copying and moving topics

You can cut, copy, and paste topics. Ctrl-C copies the selected topic(s) to the clipboard. You select a topic by clicking on the background of the topic card. A topic has a blue border when it is selected.

You can select multiple topics by selecting the first one and then then holding down the Shift key when selecting the last topic. You can also use the up and down keys to change the selection. Holding down the Shift key will extend or shrink the selection. Ctrl-A selects all topics in the current folder. The topic(s) will be stored in SLING text format in the clipboard.

Topics in the clipboard can be inserted into a folder with Ctrl-V. This inserts the topic(s) right before the (first) selected topic or at the end if no topics are selected in the current folder.

A topic can be in multiple folders at the same time. When topics are copied and pasted within the same case file, it just adds references to the existing underlying topics in the case. If a topic is edited in one folder, the changes will be shown in the other folders with a reference to the topic.

Topics can also be copied between cases. This will assign new topic ids to the pasted topics but it preserves the internal links between the topics.

You can move topics by cutting them to the clipboard with Ctrl-X. This will delete the topics from the current folder and add them to the scraps folder. You can then go to another folder and paste the topics into this. This will move the topics from the scraps folder to the new folder. The scrap folder is emptied when you save the case (Ctrl-S) or select "Clear" from the scraps folder context menu.

Ctrl-D copies the id of the selected topic to the clipboard and Ctrl-E copies the topic name to the clipboard. You can copy all the topics in the case file to the clipboard by selecting "Copy all" in the KnolCase menu in the top right-hand corner.

Editing topics

You can edit a topic by clicking the edit button in the topic toolbar or by selecting the topic and pressing Enter. In topic edit mode, you can select one or more statements, by selecting them with the mouse, or by holding down Shift when moving around with the arrow keys, just like you would do in any other text editor.

Statements can be copied to the clipboard with Ctrl-C or cut with Ctrl-X. When you copy a statement (i.e. a property with a value), the resolved property and topic ids are preserved, so when you paste them back into the same topic or another topic, they will refer to the same property and topic ids as the place you copied them from.

Pictures

"" it is said. You can add pictures to a topic by selecting a topic and pasting an image URL into it (i.e. a URL ending with .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .png, .mp4, .webm, .webp, or .avif). This adds the picture to the photo gallery of the topic. You can browse the photo gallery by clicking on the photo to the right in the topic card. To get the URL for a picture on any webpage, right-click on the image and select "Copy image address" in the context menu (Chrome).

Pictures on the internet often disappear after a short time. To prevent the pictures in your case topics from disappearing, you can cache the images on the SLING media cache service by selecting "Cache images" in the KnolCase menu in the top right-hand corner. Then images will be cached in the background and you will still be able to view them after they have disappeared from their original location.

Some sites do not allow which prevents images from these sites from being displayed properly in KnolCase. In this case, you can paste the image into the topic instead of just the image URL. You can copy an image by right-clicking on an image on a webpage and selecting "Copy image" in the context menu (Chrome). When you paste an image into a topic, it will first be stored on drive.ringgaard.com using a randomized URL, and then this image is added to the topic.

You can also paste gallery URLs into a topic. A gallery URL starts with "gallery:" followed by a list of image URLs separated by space. This format is supported by the Reddit photo search tool. Albums from Reddit and Imgur are also supported. You can search for images for a topic by clicking the image_search button on the topic toolbar.

Articles

Pasting a URL from an article or webpage into the search box will create a new topic for this page. You can also select a topic and paste the URL to add information to an existing topic. This is useful for keeping references to webpages and articles where you have found information about a topic.

KnolCase uses the meta tags from the webpage to create a topic with information about the page. It supports Facebook OpenGraph, Twitter Cards, JSON-LD, Dublin Core, Sailthru, as well as a number of generic meta tags:

KnolCase has a database of more than 3000 news sites with their Wikidata QIDs to identify the publisher of a webpage.

For example, if you want to document the source for some fact in a topic, you can add a qualifier with the source:

  1. Press Enter to make room for a new statement
  2. Press Space on the new line to start a qualifier
  3. Type 'source' and then Tab to add a property
  4. Paste the URL for the source and press Tab.

This will create a new topic for the web article with meta data and add this as the source.

Data tables

You can import tables from spreadsheets by copying some rows and columns into the clipboard and pasting these into a folder in KnolCase. You can copy data from any source that supports comma-separated or tab-separated values (CVS/TSV format).

The first row should contain the property/column names. These can be property ids (PIDs) or property names.

Each of the remaining rows are imported as a new topic. If a column name ends with #, e.g. ID#, it is expected to contain item or topic ids. Otherwise, the value is parsed according to the data type of the property, e.g. dates, number, URLs, quantities, etc.

Plug-ins

KnolCase has a number of plug-ins. These are extensions that are loaded on-the-fly when you paste a URL that matches the plug-in URL pattern into the search box or a topic. If you paste a URL into the search box you can select the plug-in in the search results. This will add a new topic produced by the plug-on to the current folder. Pasting a URL matching a plug-in into a topic will add the retrieved information from the plug-in to the selected topic. External references are checked against the cross-reference register in KnolBase and the topic is extended with any matches found.

Pictures, tables, and articles are examples of plug-ins that are used for importing data through the clipboard, but KnolCase also has more specialized plug-ins:

These plug-ins let you add a lot of information to topics by just copy and pasting URLs. For example, you can make a web search for a topic by clicking the search button in the topic toolbar to find the sites with information about the topic. You can copy the URL for the webpage using Ctrl+L Ctrl+C. Sometimes you might not even need to visit the webpage. You can copy the result URL by left-clicking on the blue link and selecting "Copy link address".

External references

You can paste URLs from many other sites with information about the topic. This adds an external references of the appropriate type to the selected topic. The following sites are supported:

Please contact us if you have other sites with Wikidata reference properties that you want to use. If the property has a this is usually easy to accomplish.