Truncated note titles

DannyD

I just purchased a wide-screen high resolution monitor. One of the main reasons is so that I can see more of the note titles in Zotero. By "note title" I mean the portion of the note that is visible in the middle pane of Zotero.

Unfortunately, it looks like these note titles are truncated for some reason. With my new monitor I can see more of the note titles than I saw on my old monitor. However, the note titles appear to be truncated in strange ways. They do not extend to the right as far as they are able. Many times they stop in the middle of a word. I have a screen shot that I could share, if that would clarify what I'm talking about.

arggem

I think the "title" is truncated at a fixed length of the first line of a note. Something like 80 characters or so.

adamsmith

yes, what arggem says. There is currently no way to change that, either.

Not that you can select the note tab on the left and that tab stays selected as you scroll through items. That may help?

DannyD

Thanks for the suggestion about selecting the note tab as I scroll through items. However, that doesn't really get at what I'm looking for. I would like to see as much of the note as possible in the middle pane. Looking at all my texts and the note titles in the middle pane gives me a powerful way to get a quick overview of my reading content. Increasing the amount of information I can see there increases my grasp of the content.

Maybe I will submit this as a feature request.

dstillman

We could do that, but I think there'd still have to be some maximum possible length, since putting the full note content into the tree might slow things down with very long notes. And it might have a detrimental effect on performance with large libraries regardless, depending on what the maximum is. But we can explore this. We'd still truncate at the first newline.

I've created an issue to track this. (Also, any thread can be considered a feature request—no need for a separate one.)

DannyD

Thanks for your feedback, Dan. I want to clarify that I'm not suggesting making the entire length of a note visible in the middle pane. Besides potentially causing slow performance, that would also defeat the purpose I mentioned above: getting a quick overview of the content of a reference by glancing through the first line of each of its notes. I'm not suggesting displaying more than one line for each note. I'm only suggesting that as much of the note as can fit on one line be visible. Does that make sense? I have a screen shot that would demonstrate what I'm thinking, if it would be helpful.

dstillman

No, I know—that's why I said we'd still truncate at the first newline. But the first newline could be far into the file.

adamsmith

I think your talking past each other WRT to "line" - If I understand correctly, Danny means "line" as in the row in the middle panel.

I believe, Danny, your idea of how truncation works is too simple: Even if only one row of text is _visible_ (which is already the case, btw.), Zotero needs to have all the text that can possibly be displayed in the middle column in memory - hence when you expand the column width, it shows up immediately. And that text in memory - even if its not visible - creates the potential slowdown.

DannyD

OK. That makes since about not wanting to load the whole note content into memory because it would degrade performance. Maybe the current limit on how much of the note is loaded into memory could be increased. It looks like the current limit is 80 characters (including spaces). On my high resolution monitor this causes several notes to be truncated when they otherwise could show 20 more characters or so.

This is not a huge deal, but as more and more people get higher resolution monitors this could be a helpful refinement.

Thanks, again, for all that you all already do to make Zotero great!

adamsmith

I think upping this to 100 should be unproblematic. Dan?

dstillman

I've increased it to 120 for 4.0.6. Existing notes won't change until they're next edited.

DannyD

You guys are amazing. I don't know of any other software or service that I use that has such responsive support!