Wistful wish: Tagging phrases in pdfs

squidskin

I know tons of other people must have thought of this by now, but I couldn't find it with a quick search through the forums.

I know that currently zotero can't annotate or highlight pdfs, but for that far off day when it happens, it would be so cool if you could tag a phrase in a pdf. For example, if I find a great paragraph on lemonade that supports my lemonade argument, it would be super to highlight that paragraph and tag it "lemonade" so that when I later click the lemonade tag, I can pull up all the various bits of supporting evidence from different papers. That would be amazing.

migugg

I second this. If possible, this kind of tagging should be able within notes too. One should ideally be able to select a word, sentence or just any part of a text (or picture) and then tag this part. A report would then give as a result all those parts (not just whole notes). This would turn zotero into a qualitative analysis tool. Something similar like TAMS analyzer or ATLAS ti.

migugg

let me elaborate on this idea: The problem now is that I always have to decide how long a note shall be and to what theme it should refer. This is often not really possible, because some quote from an article may at the same time be a lengthy contribution to the theme x (let's say: inequalities in Asia) while one sentence of this quote may refer to the theme y (let's say, contain the number of unemployed people in Indonesia). Now if I am searching for y, I get the whole note. Or I have to put y, which is a part of x into a separate note, thus duplicating information. With the solution described above, it would suffice to have one note, but I could create a report that gives me as a result either x or y, dependening on what I search for.