Highlighting and annotating

water1974

I am using b4r2r1365 on a Windows XP computer. I have encountered a number of problems with highlighting and annotating.

1. No highlights are not saved after closing a tab.
2. Only the first annotation on a file is saved after closing a tab.
3. The highlighting/annotation toolbar does not appear again for a particular file if that file was highlighted/annotated during an earlier Firefox session.

Thank you for your work and I hope these comments are helpful.

ransomca

Wow, I can't get the highlighting to work at all. No matter how I click and select, I don't get any highlight. I also can't get the annotations to work. I click and nothing happens. I should add that I'm attempting this on a pdf file saved as a Zotero snapshot, but opened in Adobe Reader in my browser window. The annotation/highlighting toolbar appears, so I figured it would work, but it doesn't. I haven't tried it with a saved html/web page snap shot.

Another comment I had, there seems to be some problem with the demonstration video for the annotations and highlighting. At some points, there is no sound, and other places things are repeated, sometimes 2 and 3 times.

Thanks!
Callista

dstillman

Annotations do not work with PDF files, only HTML and image files. Since PDFs are loaded by plugins, we don't have any way of accessing the internal structure.

Acrobat offers some built-in annotation functions, though, and it may be possible that Zotero would be able to read such data in the future (for example, to index it for searching).

bdarcus

Dan -- I just tested the annotation feature. Nice job on this.

But am I right that it currently only works on local (snapshotted) files? If yes, is there some technical reason for that restriction?

It seems while I want my annotations to be local, it'd be good if I could annotate remote resources too. Among other things, it would open the door to merging annotations across users (though I suppose you could still do that with the local-only approach, since you have the original URL).

Also, re: the technical details. how are you storing the annotations and encoding them? Are you using the annotea stuff?

Admittedly, this is new territory here, so nice to see you guys pushing the boundaries.

dstillman

Bruce -- it's Simon's code, so he can comment more on the implementation details, but the main reason we're only doing snapshots is that the DOM and URL are stable. If we did live web pages, we'd somehow need to account for the page structure changing, for different people (or the same person on different visits) viewing different versions of a page based on their respective permissions/login levels, and for figuring out when someone's even looking at the same page on sites with dynamic URL formats. There might be solutions there, but they're not easy problems.

Using snapshots doesn't preclude us from offering shared annotation capability, and in fact it's our goal to eventually offer such functionality.

The annotations are stored in SQLite. They're not yet integrated into the main data layer API, but they will be soon. We're using a combination of techniques to target the annotation on the page, involving a mixture of DOM and pixel position, which we think allows for more stable positioning of the annotations than other implementations out there. Note that, unlike some other implementations, we're also not changing the structure of the page in any way.

bdarcus

Yes, I can see those issues.

I presume you'll just treat the annotations as special kind of notes, and maybe use the annnotea RDF vocabularly (which I believe uses xpointer to locate the annotated content) to support import/export.

Will see what Simon has to say about it later.

water1974

Just to follow up: I had problems highlighting and annotating html files, not pdf files.

ransomca

I figured it didn't work in pdf files. Does the toolbar appear for any snapshot, regardless of format?
Thanks!
Callista

dstillman

Currently, yes. We'll fix that.

juliekv

Please make a note in the documentation that highlighting and annotating aren't available for PDF. For newbies such as myself this was rather frustrating following the tutorial, trying every combination of click and select and not have it work. Thanks.

raf

I'm experiencing the same problem. Neither the highlights I made, nor the annotations I wrote to a html page are saved after I closed the snapshot.

Any suggestions would be well appreciated.

R.

jolenechou

I am using zotero (a complete newbie and already a fan) on a mac. Is the highlighting/annotation feature not currently enabled for the mac platform, or am i missing the obvious? I can't seem to find the toolbar anywhere...

rantanplan

How long did I search for a tool like zotero to manage my resources? Thank you very much for this killer app!!

Unfortunately I do have the same problem with highlighting and annotating HTML snapshots, using b4r5 under linux and as well as windows. The changes are not saved!

Does nobody have an idea how to solve this problem? It doesn't appear on the known issues list, but I also don't find a solution in the documentation or in the forum.

rantanplan

rantanplan

I've found a workaround for this problem working under linux and win on my system: highlights and annotations seem to be saved by leaving the snapshot going to another website, but they are still not if I am just closing the tab.

Hope this will work for others, too.

rantanplan

bdarcus

What is the known reliability status of highlighting at this point?

I ask because I lost all higlights on a large document I was working on. Granted, I have had some power interruptions today and that might have something to do with it, but I just wanted to check as to wait for bug fixes if there are known issues.

bdarcus

To answer my own question: highlighting is still really unreliable. I just lost another full page of highlights after simply closing the snapshot and reopening it.

Any estimate of when this will be fixed? It's a great feature, but a bit of tease when it doesn't save stuff correctly.

dstillman

It seems this happens only when annotations are made on snapshots in a tab and the tab is closed, but not on snapshots opened without using tabs. Bruce, is that what you experienced?

bdarcus

Yup, that's it. I use tabs all the time.

So is it that the highlights aren't saved in tabs? Or just not displayed?

dstillman

Apparently annotations and highlights weren't saved when closing a tab. I've now fixed this on the dev branch. Looks like you can still lose annotations if you open the same snapshot in multiple windows/tabs and make changes to the first one to be closed.

Personally I think Zotero should do the same thing it does with notes and save annotations on a timer after a change, rather than waiting to close or navigate away. I'll create tickets for that and the other issue.

rantanplan

I'm losing annotations even if I make them in a single Firefox window without further opened tabs and close the browser after that. For me navigating to another site is the only way working at the time. Tested on Firefox 2.0.0.3 with Zotero b4r5 under linux.

cartesian

My highlighting and comments are not shown unless I open the Zotero snapshot directly from the Zotero window. If, for example, I click on a link within a snapshot and navigate back to it, or just hit reload, all the annotations disappear. I wonder if this accounts for a lot of reports of "lost" annotations? Is this as designed, and if so, can the design be changed so that annotations are always shown when the snapshot file is viewed in the browser (however it got there)?
(I use tabs and TabMixPlus, in case that's relevant).

benshaine

I'm unable to delete or move an annotation note on a web page snapshot -- clicking on the appropriate boxes near the left or right upper corners of the note doesn't do anything. Any suggestions? I'm running zotero 1.0 downloaded 11/4/07 with Firefox 2.0.0.9 & Mac OS X 10.39. Thanks for any help!

seventypes

I'm using Zotero on Mac OS X 10.3.9 and am experiencing the problem described by benshaine above. Somewhat more strangely, I've also discovered that when I reopen a snapshot, a lot of my annotations have moved to different parts of the text. Some of them have moved to the top of the window, and the bar that allows you to move/collapse/delete them is too high to reach. Baffling! Any help would be appreciated.

rshs

I see that my problem is shared by others, but don't see a direct answer. In short, the toolbar doesn't appear, therefore I can not highlight nor annotate Web pages, plus the Zotero that the documentation says should appear in the browser address bar doesn't appear. In short, I can't access much of the functionality of Zotero. I am running FireFox 2 under Leopard. Is it Leopard's fault? What's going on? Thanks.
rshs

dmwatlse

I'll add my voice to those of seventypes and rshs: I'm running Zotero on Mac Leopard and can create annotations without trouble, but can neither move nor delete the.

musicman3569

For dmwatlse, move and delete act a little wierd. To delete, I had to delete all the text from the note first, and then the button worked. To move, click the move button at the top right so it changes to white, then click where you want the top corner to appear and it will move. Hope it works for you!

benshaine

As an alternative to Zotero annotations and notes, which at this point have the complications described above (& annotations work inconsistently for me), I'm using the Firefox add-on "Scrapbook" instead to edit pages, which seems to work fine in combo with Zotero, doesn't have the bugs, and has some additional features.

ptietjen

[quote] I'm using Zotero on Mac OS X 10.3.9 and am experiencing the problem described by benshaine above.[quote]

I'm having this problem too. Has somebody already filed this as a bug?

dstillman

Problems with move and delete should've been fixed in 1.0.3. If you're still having trouble, make sure you're running 1.0.3, check if Report Errors becomes active, and post the errors here. (The error reporting system is currently broken due to a network issue outside of our control.)

ptietjen

Thanks. I'm running 1.0.3 but still experiencing the same problem.

whatthedickens

I found this discussion after opening my own thread on what seems to be the same problem. But the fact that I'm having the problem in August 2008 running FF 3.0.1 on Mac OS 10.5.4 seems like an ominous sign...

See http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3937/erratic-saving/#Item_1