Clickable links in Notes?

hcsiller

Hi, I use Zotero to manage not only bibliographic references, but also to manage information (about good restaurants, dentist recommendations, gift ideas, etc).

So I have a lot of standalone notes that contain URLs in the form of an HTML link (since it is not possible to attach a link to a standalone note).

Now, if I want to actually visit the link in question, I cannot click on it as displayed in the note panel (I tried holding down modifying keys, and right-clicking - none work).

So it looks like I have to put the cursor on the link, hit the "edit link" button, copy the URL from the dialog box that pops up, open a new browser tab and past the link.
This is very tedious.

Would it be possible to make HTML links in notes clickable by default. Or at the very least include a "go to /follow link" item in the right-click menu? OR as a least-preferred possibility, include the possibility to attach links to standalone notes?

Thanks!

bdarcus

Hi, I use Zotero to manage not only bibliographic references, but also to manage information (about good restaurants, dentist recommendations, gift ideas, etc).

I think this is the main problem here.

Zotero isn't for managing this sort of information, and there are better options out there for that. I, for example, use services like delicious for generic bookmarks, where I have a browser plug-in that allows me to just click a button, and tag the item, add notes, etc.

hcsiller

I just realized: I could "generate a report" which will contain clickable links.

This is a workaround for me - but I still want to push my suggestions above in order to provide a solution for this problem that users can discover where they expect them (ie with a modifier key, or a right-click).
Using reports for this is non-obvious to a user - so one of the above suggestions would make sense from a usability perspective IMHO. I have been using Zotero intensively for about 2 years, and this only occurred to me now (but maybe I'm just stupid).

After all, if I generate a report for a book, it does NOT contain clickable links, EVEN if there is a URL attached to the book item. So I never thought that reports of notes would display clickable links...

adamsmith

I think clickable links in notes would be nice in any case (one usage scenario squarely within bibliographic use would be, for example, to link to a specific passage in a document from a note) - but I thought that's a limitation of the implementation of the note software (TinyMCE). If I remember this has been discussed before and is non-trivial to do.

ajlyon

Links are not visitable in the default setup of the note software, but it should still be possible to add "Visit link" to the pop-up menu for a link, or to have shift-click go to the link target. I explored this in a previous topic on the forums-- TinyMCE does have a hook for click actions, and this really ought to be doable.

This is something that I really want to see fixed for the purposes of creating links between Zotero items and note text. That means I should look into fixing it myself, but ... I haven't.

lesbell

I've just discovered another use case for this functionality. Amazon's Kindle for PC application now supports a kind of anchor link to within Kindle books - for example

kindle://book/?action=open&asin=B0041OTAQQ&location=899

will open (downloading if necessary) Gintis, H. (2009). Game Theory Evolving: A Problem-Centered Introduction to Modeling Strategic Interaction (2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. and will go directly to location 899 within the book.

While Kindle owners can see all their highlights and notes at http://kindle.amazon.com and follow links there, that site is currently not up to use for bibliographic work. However, I've confirmed that this type of URL will work correctly in EverNote and doubtless other applications. It would be nice to have it work with Zotero as well.

kithairon

The kindle links (kindle://book/?action=...) seem to work from Zotero notes – at least on the Mac. I can get them to open the Kindle-Mac-App from a note in Z with the desired book at the location indicated with the help of the "Open URL"-service (and a keyboard shortcut). Maybe something like this works on Win or Linux?

What I'd really wish, was to add such links with Zotero's "Add Link to URI"-option. See here

lesbell

That's great, that it works on the Mac! Unfortunately, on the PC, I tried every combination of Ctrl-, Alt- and Shift-clicking (plus right-clicking), but no joy. It works fine in the URL field of an item, but of course, that's not what it's meant for and it's going to screw up bibliographies.

With the rapid growth of ebooks, including their use in academia, this would seem to be a really useful - and hopefully, easily-implemented - feature for students and researchers.

(One other, unrelated comment: We've seen "?action=open", but I wonder what other actions are possible?)

Greg

any news on this? On Mac OS, I can open links like zotero://select/items/... from reports but not from the note itself. Support for notes and other platforms would be awesome!!