<story><title>Reverse engineering the Notability file format</title><url>https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/03/31/reverse-engineering-notability-format/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>userbinator</author><text>To summarise, it&amp;#x27;s a .zip file containing a binary serialisation of XML, which then contains the base64&amp;#x27;d raw coordinates...&lt;p&gt;Reminds me of this (it gets even better in the comments):
&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;thedailywtf.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;XXL-XML&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;thedailywtf.com&amp;#x2F;articles&amp;#x2F;XXL-XML&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Nothing in here was really complicated – it was just some existing standard formats (zip! apple plist! an array of floats!) combined together in a pretty simple way.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s rather telling that wrapping points in 3 layers of encodings is considered &amp;quot;pretty simple&amp;quot;, almost the norm today, when years ago doing such a thing would probably elicit reactions more towards &lt;i&gt;WTF&lt;/i&gt;.</text></comment>
<story><title>Reverse engineering the Notability file format</title><url>https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/03/31/reverse-engineering-notability-format/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>Julia Evans is the best. I&amp;#x27;ve been following her on Twitter for years because she brings so much enthusiasm about learning technology that she makes me see familiar things anew. By the end of an exploration, even it it&amp;#x27;s something I know well, I end up saying, &amp;quot;Holy shit, strace is cool.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;To get a feel for her work, a bunch of her posts are here: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;jvns.ca&amp;#x2F;categories&amp;#x2F;favorite&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;jvns.ca&amp;#x2F;categories&amp;#x2F;favorite&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>