Tables in notetaking

stoic1348

I'm trying to master zotero. One thing I want to use it for, is taking notes on the texts I read. When I'm trying to summarize a lot of text, I find that tables help me. But I see no way with the built-in word processor to do tables. I have to make the table in Word or some other wp program, then cut-and-paste it to Zotero.

Am I missing something simple here? Does Zotero have a way to make simple tables? Or is cut-and-paste the way to go?

adamsmith

unless you want to write the tables in html - which you can, but probably don't find very convenient - using cut and paste is the only way to go.
Zotero provides a simple rich-text editor for notes, it can't provide you with full word processing facilities.

stoic1348

OK...thanks. It would probably take a lot of code to add that functionality to the program.

twylite

Zotero uses the TinyMCE WYSIWYG Javascript editor for notes. If you extract your chrome/zotero.jar you can upgrade TinyMCE (content/zotero/tinymce) and change the contents of tinyMCE.init({...}) in content/zotero/notes.html (Zotero 4.0.x).

I'm using TinyMCE 3.5.8 from http://www.tinymce.com/download/download.php, and in my notes.html I've integrated the 'General options', 'Theme options' and 'Skin options' from the TinyMCE example at http://www.tinymce.com/tryit/3_x/full.php. Then I restored theme_advanced_buttons1 and theme_advanced_buttons2 to the Zotero defaults, and set 'theme_advanced_buttons3 : "tablecontrols",'. Perfectly usable table editing, and I get Ctrl-K as a shortcut to insert/edit link :)

twylite

See also https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/7794/ and http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/8784/howto-enable-additional-tinymce-note-editor-functionality/.

Greg

Thanks for posting this. Very helpful!

Has anyone tried this with the TinyMCE 4.0b? And is there a chance that zotero itself upgrades to TinyMCE 4? That would be pretty awesome! Would the developers accept a pull request that upgrades to TinyMCE 4 once it's released?

nalight

Since I can barely understand Twylite's description of May 31 I wonder what to do for mere mortals. Is there an easier way to control the options and version on TinyMCE. As it is I am trying to figure out what I can put in to modify text size and appearance on a notes page. I have tried a lot of options particularly within the HTML table that I have formatted very easily using this page: http://www.quackit.com/html/html_table_generator.cfm

I did not try the CSS version from here (http://www.textfixer.com/html/html-table-generator.php) because TinyMCE seems to strip out CSS tags.

The most frustrating was when I used the old (deprecated)
<font size="2" color="blue"> and TinyMCE stripped out all of the succeeding table row tags. And there is not way to revert to the previous version so I have to rebuild the table from the original description. Anyone editing HTML thus is advised to keep a backup copy because of this possibility of permanent loss of format at least.

So two questions: one, is TinyMCE documented anywhere for the editing public, because their own site seems primarily intended for documenting how to integrate it with other systems.

two: is there going to be a description of the kinds of things TinyMCE does and does not support as it has been integrated into Zotero? I would like to make fuller use of it but it apparently has some real quirks in what it accepts.

Thanks!

nalight

Further testing shows that one advantage of using the table creator mentioned above allows me to define attributes that are not preserved when blocking and copying from Word. Still cannot get font size or color to change however.

Here is the table definition that does work in TinyMCE, as an example:

<code>
<table style="background-color: #33ccff;" border="1" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="2" width="100%" bordercolor="#FFCC00">
</code>

nastia4

I'm actually running into trouble even pasting a table into notes - no matter how small I make it in word, it's cut off at the left side when I paste it into zoter.... any suggestions?

AbeJellinek

@nastia4: Are you using the Zotero beta with the new note editor and PDF reader?

(A decent amount of the advice in this thread is going to be out-of-date given that the last comment was from 2013, and even more so with the new editor.)