Customizing generated reports

Have just started using Zotero and love it. In addition to using it as an indexing/bibliographic tool, it also has great capabilities for compiling clips from Web pages and distributing them as aggregated news clips. (I use Zotero on a Mac OS X, running 10.4 and firefox.
To do this, I've been pasting paragraphs into the notes section and then generating a report. I have several questions related to making this process as easy and useful as possible.
-- is there a way to customize the fields that are generated in the reports? I've looked but don't see that option anywhere, and I'd like to remove the type, accessed and modified fields.
-- Is there a way apply formatting either directly to the notes field and have that apply to the generated report, or instead to customize the output of the notes' plain text when generating a report? Currently, all the notes print as a single lumped mass of text without even any paragraph marks. Would love to at least be able to include paragraph breaks, or even better, bold headlines.
-- The report generated orders the individual references in the same order they're categorized in the center pane in my Zotero window. I currently have them sorted by title. In the pull-down window, I don't see "tags" listed as one of the fields available to group with. Is it possible to sort all the items in a collection using tags and then generate a report with the entries listed in that order?
Any help that can be provided would be great.
Thanks in advance.
  • is there a way to customize the fields that are generated in the reports? I've looked but don't see that option anywhere, and I'd like to remove the type, accessed and modified fields.
    We intend to do this but it will probably be sometime before this feature is available.
    Is there a way apply formatting either directly to the notes field and have that apply to the generated report, or instead to customize the output of the notes' plain text when generating a report?
    Your paragraph breaks should come through. (I just tested this on OS 10 and Windows XP) There have been many conversations about adding rich text to notes and we will probably figure something out in this respect (for example see http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/445/)

    You might try using saved searches for each of the tags you find useful. I don't think I understand how you could sort items by tag. Since each item has a variety of tags on it I'm not quite sure which you would use to sort by.
  • Hi,
    I read your comment about customizing reports a few weeks ago, and it prompted me to write a quick and dirty solution: a script that accepts the html source of your report, lets you enter your display preferences, and then spits the customized report back out.

    I started a new thread for it here
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