Feature request: page breaks between items in report

tdsmith

Hi! I just discovered the "generate report from selected items" option and I love it a lot. Can you add an option to ask Firefox to force a page-break between items in the report, though? (Even better would be if you could force the next item to begin on an odd page number so I can safely print double-sided, but now I'm probably dreaming.) This could be implemented pretty easily with the page-break-after CSS property (assuming no glaring implementation bugs in Firefox, which might be too much to ask when it comes to printing, I've sadly learned through experience). I have dozens of notes on each of my items and I'd like to batch-print my notes and then segment them.

Thanks! I love Zotero and I've been evangelizing it furiously. :)
tim

dstillman

Ticket created.

shel

Did anything ever come of this?

adamsmith

no. It's the type of issue where I'm sure the devs would love to accept a patch, though.

shel

Thanks for the quick reply! I'm sure the devs have more important issues to tackle. I do think that the ability to put one note/source on one page for printing purposes is one of those seemingly minor improvements that would make Zotero more appealing to a lot of people. I know at last three people who, despite my cajoling, do not use Zotero solely because they cannot easily print one source per page; it would also be great, as others have suggested, to more easily manipulate the layout of reports. Maybe someone who is technically capable (not me, unfortunately) could take a crack at it?

Gracile

@shel: I've proposed a small patch (https://github.com/zotero/zotero/pull/105).

dstillman

As I noted on the pull request, the suggested patch won't do, but I'm happy to include this functionality along with other report customization options, which we've long planned. I always assumed we'd do this via a XUL dialog before the report generation, but doing it from the HTML itself isn't a bad idea—I never liked the idea of having to click through a dialog before viewing each report.

If we do it from the HTML, I'm envisioning a hover target (fixed on scroll) in the top-left corner or along the left or top page edges—or maybe just an "Options" link—that would slide out/reveal an overlay with various customization options. Some, like this one, could be implemented in local JS. Others that needed new data (e.g., a bib format to replace the table) would reload the report with a new URL with query string options.

It'd be good to make the options persist, though I'm not totally sure how we'd do that. It's possible we can put a privileged function into the page to allow persisting of the options.

Anyway, we don't need to implement all of that just for this, but I'd like this option to go in such an overlay, even if it's the only thing there for now.

Gracile

Thanks Dan! I'll try to follow these guidelines. Not sure that it's in my skills yet.