Notes grouping alphabetically instead of chronologically???!!!

xmjh1

I just downloaded the latest update to Zotero (1.0.1?), and when I take notes on an article, they suddendly exhibit strange behavior--the notes are now organizing themselves alphabetically, i.e. by the first letter of first word of the note, rather than chronologically, i.e. in the sequence that I actually take the notes. This is really annoying behavior, as the notes end up totally out of sequence. I have never had this problem before. Is there any way to remedy it?

Thanks!

Matthew

xmjh1

I just saw Dan's comment from Oct. 25th, that in the latest verion of Zotero, the note sort alphabetically rather than chronologically. I totally fail to see the logic of this. If you are moving through an article, taking notes in sequence, capturing the flow and development of the argument, to have the notes resequence themselves alphabetically totally kills the value of your notes. I don't get this update at all. Yes, I can see where you can order your notes by numbering them, 1, 2, 3, ... But that is an added step, and a workaround. Why the alphabetical sequencing? This really makes things un-user-friendly!!!

Thanks.

dstillman

With the previous behavior there was no way to reorder notes short of deleting them and recreating them in another order. That seems far more un-user-friendly to me.

This way there's at least a workaround for manual sorting, at least until Zotero supports manual ordering (which may happen eventually).

Remember that people use notes in many different ways—for example, taking separate notes on individual chapters of a book—and sorting by Date Added is completely useless for that.

xmjh1

The problem is that all of the notes that I have been taking for the past several months and ordering by "date added" are now a worthless jumble of disorganized notes. Had I known months ago when I first started using Zotero that the plan was retroactively to sort the notes alphabetically, I would have started sequencing them numerically from the beginning. Is there anyway to "undo" this update? At least until I can go back and presumably number all of the hundreds and hundreds of notes that I have organized by date added. Some of these are for very comlex theoretical works, where the sequence of the notes is crucial to understanding what comes before and afterwards. It seems also, that people should be warned about the effect that this update will have on their existing notes before installing it.

Thank you.

bdarcus

The problem is, people are assuming notes are ordered, but they are not.

I'd suggest that Zotero allow a choice of sorting keys for notes, just as it does in the table view of the library.

As I've said before, I'd be extremely leery of hard-coding order into the storage of notes. to me, that will likely create more problems than it solves.

dstillman

OK, I've added a hidden pref for this, extensions.zotero.sortNotesChronologically, in the latest branch build. It'll be in 1.0.2.

The pref is off by default. You'll be able to change it by going to about:config in the address bar.

erazlogo

matthew--
your plan for notetaking presumes that you'll never come back to the same article to take further notes. i would imagine particularly complex theoretical works would require rereading/reconsideration and hence may require additional notetaking. it may be useful to record the page numbers and the order of quotations/ideas on each page in your notes, in addition to arranging them by date added, just in case. (that's why alphabetical sorting makes sense to me--it allows one to sort by page number/order in the text).

xmjh1

Erazlogo:
Do you start your note with the page number as a way of keeping all your notes in sequence? That way theoretically you could go back to an earlier point in the text and add additional notes and they would fall in the proper sequence. Thanks for this suggestion.

Dan:
Thank you for adding the hidden pref in the latest branch build. This will give zotero users like myself the chance to sequence our notes, e.g. by page numbers, so that they fall in the right order in the future. And BTW, thank you for your hard work on this wonderful tool!

erazlogo

Do you start your note with the page number as a way of keeping all your notes in sequence? That way theoretically you could go back to an earlier point in the text and add additional notes and they would fall in the proper sequence.

Yes, exactly--you can start each note with the page number and just add zeros to small numbers to sort correctly, i.e. [002], [045], [367]. For multiple notes from the same page, you could just enter [367a], [367b], etc.

xmjh1

Thanks for the clarification on this! I'll give it a try.