Syncing note attachments

ggrantt

I'm a huge fan of Zotfile. I use it to rename all of my PDFs, keep a nicely organized library stored on Dropbox, and extract all of my PDF annotations (highlights, comments, underlines using GoodReader on the iPad) as "note" attachments in Zotero.

But I find Zotero's note functionality itself pretty limited. All of those extracted annotations feel locked in, and it would be nice to have them more easily accessible and functional. Why not plain text or even Markdown as an option, rather than the default HTML formatting of the "generate a report" function? Why not be able to store all of these annotations in one location?

What I'm looking for is the ability to a) sync all of my note attachments on some other server, and b) do so in a variety of formats -- not just HTML but plain text or (ideally) Markdown. The idea is to do for note attachments what Zotfile does for PDFs: automatically renamed text files stored in a single location for easy access. Imagine having one folder containing all of your PDFs (thanks Zotfile) and another that contains all of your plain text annotations in one place!

Is there anything out there that approximates this?

adamsmith

Notes are accessible via both server and javascript api, so anyone who wants to write a tool can read them out, but I see little reason why Zotero should do that? The whole point of notes is that they're tied into the Zotero database. If you don't want that, just attach text files.

I'm not sure I understand the html vs. markdown issue - those can be converted easily - the whole (original) point of markdown is that it's easy to _write_ and convert to html.

ggrantt

Interesting to hear that about the accessibility of notes via the api -- I might have to figure out how to write an extension.

Attaching text files is certainly an option, but Zotfile's default method of extracting annotations from PDFs is to attach an HTML-formatted "note."

Re: Markdown, from learning about these things over the past few months, it seems like the community of people using Markdown and the variety of its applications has really diversified. Markdown is becoming less an intuitive, human-readable means of producing HTML as it is a kernel of plain text that can grow into almost anything. Using Pandoc, markdown supports citations, illustrations, outlines, and formulas all in plain text, and can export to .docx, really nice PDFs, and LaTeX, in addition to HTML. And all of that plain text can be version-tracked, etc.

But this is getting off topic. Basically, I'd like to be able to have the same control and flexibility over my (automatically extracted) PDF annotations as I have over my PDF library.