Upgrade StorageZotero 7 Beta - Can not extract Ink Annotations to Notes
Hey Zotero-Community,
i was playing around with Zotero 7 Beta lately. I really like the ink annotations in Zotero's internal PDF reader.
I want to add ink annotations to my workflow, which involves transferring annotations to Obsidian. In order to make all annotations visible for the Obsidian plugins (Citations + Zotero Integration), i need to extract them to notes.
However, i haven't been able to extract ink annotations to notes. But they appear in the 'Annotations' section of the attached file. 'Select Area' on the other hand can be extracted to notes.
Without any further knowlegde of implementation details: Selecting areas seems to me like a similar use case. Both ink and area annotations are boxed and recognized as individual annotations. Only difference i can think of is the file format of saving. SVG instead of jpg would be more convinient for zooming into small ink annotations.
Was extracting ink annotations to notes an intended feature in the first place?
If so, what is the correct workflow of extracting? Simply making ink annotations and then pressing 'Add Note from Annotations'?
Thanks in advance for your time.
i was playing around with Zotero 7 Beta lately. I really like the ink annotations in Zotero's internal PDF reader.
I want to add ink annotations to my workflow, which involves transferring annotations to Obsidian. In order to make all annotations visible for the Obsidian plugins (Citations + Zotero Integration), i need to extract them to notes.
However, i haven't been able to extract ink annotations to notes. But they appear in the 'Annotations' section of the attached file. 'Select Area' on the other hand can be extracted to notes.
Without any further knowlegde of implementation details: Selecting areas seems to me like a similar use case. Both ink and area annotations are boxed and recognized as individual annotations. Only difference i can think of is the file format of saving. SVG instead of jpg would be more convinient for zooming into small ink annotations.
Was extracting ink annotations to notes an intended feature in the first place?
If so, what is the correct workflow of extracting? Simply making ink annotations and then pressing 'Add Note from Annotations'?
Thanks in advance for your time.
Image annotations ("Select Area") are just rectangular sections of the document, so it's straightforward to generate an image and insert that into the note, and there's a reasonable expectation that you want that when running "Add Note from Annotations".
With ink annotations, the annotation itself is a just a path, so first we'd have to decide whether the inserted images were also just the paths (in which case SVG would make sense) or if they should be rectangular sections of the document like image annotations (in which case they'd have to be PNGs). And since people could easily have hundreds of ink annotations in a document — potentially just stray marks here and there — we couldn't really have "Add Note from Annotations" include them by default, and so things just get complicated.
It totally makes sense that image annotations are easier to handle. Thanks for clarifying that.
Is there a limit on the amount of image annotations per file? If not, they could also lead to overcrowed notes when extracting them, or am i missing something here?
May I state my humble view here on possible use case(s) regarding the use of ink annotations in notes:
1. When I read papers, I sometimes add conceptual drawings, which most likely are diagrams rather than text. Such diagrams can usually convey a deeper understanding in a very compact form, for me at least. Besides my workflow with Obsidian (extracting all annotations via the notes) summarizing the ideas of a paper in a note seems reasonable to me even with a Zotero-only workflow.
2. That said, adding comments to ink annotations analogously to the image annotations would make sense, if the ink drawing is just a diagram. Comments could help to link the drawing to text of the paper or the other annotations (in the summary note) on a semantic level.
3. The option to manually group multiple ink annotations to one single ink annotation would allow users to reduce unintended stray ink annotations. (Something like rectangular select with merge option.)
4. Adding extra empty pages to the file via Zotero's interal reader would increase the ease of use even further, considering the limited space in the PDFs.
(2., 3. and 4. would possibly require a separate thread, but I have added them here to give a more comprehensive sketch of my (desired) workflow. Let me know if I should start new threads for those features to keep content and thread titles aligned.)
Regarding the design/implementation:
1. Using SVGs instead of PNGs probably comes with the advantage of having no distracting background as well as zoom-in abilities. SVGs would probably also yield a decreased storage size compared to PNGs.
2. To further allow moving around already existing ink annotations - in contrast to image annotations - there is probably a need to separate the storing of positional information from the content storing. I don't know whether or not this can be easily implemented in your current design.
One may use the plugin 'Zotlit' (https://zotlit.aidenlx.top/) both in Zotero and Obsidian to handle data transfer from Zotero to Obsidian. Reduces the transfer process from 2 plugins and 2 commands to just 1. This plugin is also able to extract annotations from the Zotero database directly without the need to use Zotero notes ('Add Note from Annotations' command in Zotero). And you have more control on how design the Obsidian literature note (with markdown inline JavaScript commands).
But still, the content of ink annotations is not transferred to Obsidian.
Update: I took a deeper look into the ZotLit Source Code (Obsidian Plugin) and found that ink annotations are not displayed in Obsidian because the plugin is not loading it. So no problem on the Zotero side here.
But saving ink annotations as SVGs would still be more convenient from my point of view.