Feature Request: better web-readability for notes

ghiozzo · August 9, 2014

I would like to access notes from our zotero-group on mobile devices. As there seems to be no reliable app for this, I've tried accessing notes via webbrowser app's (android standard browser, firefox for android, dolphin browser --> www.zotero.org).

That worked out quite well, except that it's really difficult to read the notes. They don't scale to the screen, using only a small portion of the available width.

I think it would be very cool for the mobile website of zotero, if notes would automatically cover the whole width of the screen.

p.s. when I checked back on the website today with my desktop-pc, I got served the mobile-version of the website (I don't mind!). Here also, the notes don't scale to the width of the screen...

IMHO it would be a huge improvement to make notes more readable on all devices by scaling their width on the web-frontend of zotero.

ghiozzo · August 13, 2014

hmmmm, not much resonance there. So, are there better ways of reading notes on mobile devices than using the website? How are you reading your notes underway?

bwiernik · August 15, 2014

I'm not certain, but I think this may be an issue with the browser you're using. I'm on iPhone Safari and Chrome. Notes scale across 80% of the screen (all the way but the sidebar; certainly readable). Is that the behavior you see? If not, perhaps try Chrome for Android to see if the issue is a conflict with the other Android browsers.

ghiozzo · August 18, 2014

Thanks for your comment. Chrome I can't install, I'm sitting on an old android 2.3.6 here... :(

With firefox I just noticed that actually the problem is not sooo much the with. It's more the height here. My actual note appears in a small whit container within a large grey container. Maybe it depends on the vertical/horizontal position of the mobile-device.

The grey container contains Meta-Info such as Creator, Title, and Tags. Tags covers >50% of the screenheight, even though my note is not tagged at all.

The white container with the note-content is squished between the Meta-Info Title and Tag. The white container covers about 20% of the screen-height and 80% of the screen width. To read the note I have to scroll within the white container (the height covers only about 6 lines of text in a very small font).

So overall, I'm finding the readability of a note very poor. Download-time on my old android 2.3.6 takes forever, even with WLAN activated.

I think for mobile-versions of the website, Zotero could deliver the HTML-content of the note only (only the stuff in the white container).That would minimize database/internet-traffic and maximize readability?