website: 'My Library' and group library layout

mark

Will the look and feel of library pages become more sophisticated in the future? Right now, (public) group libraries have a spartan look. Similarly, one's public library is not very useful except if you want to give people an URL to a specific ref.

A search function, sortable columns (with multiple sorts, e.g. sort by year then by author), editable columns and display options like 'show/hide abstracts' would be handy things to have. Citeline bibliographies look very nice — see http://is.gd/1gZRJ for an example.

noksagt

Improvements are planned. See, e.g. http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/5820/

Max Rasbold-Gabbard

I second the suggestions made above as well as those made in the referenced thread. I also wonder if there are any plans for a function that would allow users who are viewing a group library to filter references by tag.

amandafrench

I agree that changes would be useful, especially sortable tables. Short of that, though, there could be display improvements: right now, for instance, it's difficult to tell what folder one is in. For instance, here's the link to my "Dead Metaphor" collection: http://www.zotero.org/amandafrench/items/collection/1023734

Yes, there's great big black and white text at the top saying "Items in Collection Dead Metaphor," but the "Dead Metaphor" folder on the left isn't highlighted, or not very obviously. It'd be nice if it were.

But I love Zotero! Had to be said. Thanks so much, you guys!

noksagt

It has a separate class (="current-collection") & the default style should make the font bold.

amandafrench

Doesn't look like it. See http://www.flickr.com/photos/amandafrench/3946105450/sizes/o/

I almost told you what browser I'm using, but I guess you know that, right? :)

aszszelp

It's highlighted over here... maybe they've fixed it by now, amanda?

dstillman

There's nothing to fix. The style is correct, as noksagt noted, but Amanda has (or had, when she took that screenshot) some sort of CSS problem—all body text in that screenshot is rendered as bold.

mark

The fontstack in the CSS could be improved, I suspect. At work I have one PC where the Zotero website is rendered as in Amanda's screenshot; my laptop however does it OK. It has something to do with Lucida Grande vs. Lucida Sans vs. Lucida Sans Unicode — probably Amanda is missing the first two and the whole thing is rendered in Lucida Sans Unicode, which doesn't have a bold style. (Not at work now, so can't tell for sure.)

amandafrench

Hmm, that could be it, Mark. The screenshot was taken from my PC, which is running Win XP, but when I look at it on my Mac, the folder is properly highlighted in bold (though it's still not very prominent).

dstillman

Having only Lucida Sans Unicode wouldn't cause all text to be rendered bold, though—it would just mean that the current collection would be rendered in fake bold. I can reproduce Amanda's problem on Windows only by removing all Lucida fonts except Lucida Sans Demibold Roman. I'm not sure how exactly that would happen, but it would be helpful if someone who's seeing that could open c:\windows\fonts and confirm that that's the problem.

There are apparently some optimizations to improve Lucida rendering on Windows when multiple Lucida fonts are available, but I don't know if there's anything we could do about Amanda's issue if she's missing basic font styles. (Lucida Sans Unicode is apparently installed on 97.51% of Windows systems.)

amandafrench

I'll check my fonts folder tomorrow, Dan, when I'm at work. I certainly didn't delete any fonts, but it's an older Dell that they gave me to work on, so who knows what previous users might've done.

mark

At my work PC I have the following fonts installed:

Lucida Sans Regular & Lucida Sans Italic
Lucida Sans Demibold & Lucida Sans Demibold Italic
Lucida Sans Unicode

The Zotero site is rendered in exactly the same way as Amanda's screenshot.