Zotero for Android pen annotation help

HamishBrookes

I recently purchased a Lenovo android tablet with stylus once I heard the the official Zotero app for Android was released.

I want to make a highlight and then quickly tap it to make a note using the tablet's handwriting to text functionality. Unfortunately I require my annotations to be stored as plain text for the rest of my workflow.

It seems that in order to open the annotation Window, I first need to deselect the highlight too and then press the annotation. Is that correct? This seems to be quite a bit of friction when once is taking dozens of annotations. If it were even just possible to toggle using the button on the stylus that would be sufficient but I can't seem to find any option like that.

Very excited to incorporate this into my workflow and I appreciate any insights, thank you.

HamishBrookes

Bumping this issue.

To be clear I want to use the highlight tool, and with it still selected tap highlighted text to open the window for annotation entry without having to go back to the palette to deselect the highlight tool.

This is driving me a little crazy and seems like something I might just be missing? Selecting text without a tool selected and making highlight from that is a little closer to what I need, but the text selection is cumbersome in that mode.

Even just an option to set a button press on the stylus would be a good enough solution. Am I doing something wrong or not providing enough info? @dstillman

kareliot

I agree. This is (one of) the main reason why I am not using zotero on my supernote.
There seems to have been no progress on the bug report over on github:
https://github.com/zotero/zotero-android/issues/175

dstillman

As noted in the issue, this was a bug in the Android version of the PDF framework we use on Android and iOS, but they've since addressed it, so we should be able to fix this soon.

HamishBrookes

Glad to hear it thanks for your work. I've been working around this by using Zoo for Zotero and Xodo. Would be a nice feature to be able to even just be able to open the pdf from the Zotero app and mark it up in an alternative pdf reader like Xodo.

ursus_arctos

Other things that would be nice:

--Make it possible to edit highlights. It would be nice to be able to long-tap a highlight you've just placed, and be able to change where the highlight begins/ends.

--Make it possible to move the annotations/highlights toolbar, so that it doesn't overlap the text you're looking at/working with. Perhaps make it so you can dock it at the toolbar, or minimize it. (I mostly do highlights and very few other annotations, so I don't really need to switch between the different tools that are there.)