WYSIWYG Notes

mryckman

Hello - Zotero is a great app by the way...

I think it would be pretty cool to get a WYSIWYG HTML editor as an option for the notes. The notes features in Zotero are definitely pretty powerful, but I feel like it is - in many ways - an underutilized feature. Imagine if you could do a full outline of the citation in your notes alone? This would go a long way.

Related to that, another feature that would show up in doing this would be that you could effectively take all your notes on a project in a notes file that's included in a collection of citations. So basically you can get rid of OneNote, or whatever, and have all your citations and notes in one place. The rest of the infrastructure is in place for this sort of a setup - the only need is a more advanced notes editor.

arggem

Check out this link: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/3894/format-text-in-notes

sean

1.5 will offer rich text notes.

bdarcus

@sean: I was just looking through a commit log of these changes. If I read them right, the text areas will now add support for HTML tags like b, i (blah), em, strong, blockquotes, links, and lists. But I did not notice inline quotes, which seems an obvious requirement for this scholarly use case (ideally with some way to hack in allowing locators to be attached to them and to blockquotes, but that may be difficult).

dstillman

Bruce: We're using TinyMCE, which automatically generates semantic XHTML (e.g., strong and em, not b and i). As far as I can tell, it doesn't have a button for <q> (probably because it's been problematic to use <q> in browsers that don't automatically add quotes and don't support CSS generated content), so we'd have to build in support for that ourselves.

And yes, we would like to hack it to support some sort of locators, but we haven't gotten that far yet.

bdarcus

Sounds good Dan. While inline quotes are nice to have, blockquotes are in my view more important, so I think fine to start there.

BTW, I know q isn't always available in these interfaces, but I did notice that GMail includes it by default.

mryckman

Hello,

Good to hear - so it sounds like HTML will be supported down the road... That's great because I have a bunch of existing notes in HTML.

Any idea when that would show up in a release?

Thanks,

Mike

dstillman

It'll be in the next 1.5 preview release.

mryckman

man... now that's fantastic... you guys are awesome.

Mike

bdarcus

A note on this:

And yes, we would like to hack it to support some sort of locators, but we haven't gotten that far yet.

One possibility to consider for embedding citation metadata in the content is to use RDFa.

bdarcus

And another option is just to mildly abuse the standard title and/or cite (where you have a URI) attributes. Maybe something like:

<blockquote title="Doe,Jane;Smith,Stan:Title:1999@23">
...
</blockquote>
Could even use a little JS to then display that information properly (which I'm doing with some HTML slideshows I'm working on) and pass it off to word-processor clients.

BTW, I'm finding the note editor almost good enough to write manuscripts in. Am currently working on a book review, and see no need to switch to OOo.

erazlogo

And another option is just to mildly abuse the standard title and/or cite (where you have a URI) attributes.
The problem with this option that if I write 20 notes on the same book, I have to enter the author/title every time. This should not be necessary in a sophisticated database.

A less labor-intensive option would be to reformat the link to the parent item above the note as a short reference to the source (letters and interviews already have that, for example: [Sevareid; Letter to Stadler; February 18, 1947]). Then, once Zotero makes in possible to enclose page numbers in specific tags in the note, Zotero could add a page number to this, and display a pull-down on right-click with options to copy the short reference, with page numbers, in various formats.

bdarcus

@erazlogo: right, I wasn't meaning that a user would have to input that information (aside from the page number); just that it would be a way for Zotero to encode it.