working with notes

roelder

I would just like to add my vote for increased flexibility in the notes department. It's really frustrating not to be able to drag and rearrange notes, or to arrange hierarchies of notes, or to use rich text.

Otherwise, I love Zotero.

zmg

In support of hmarcuse, roelder and others: I am writing on my thesis. I found zotero and I love it. But I desperately could need something very simple:

a) The possibility to arrange single child-notes of several books/articles/etc. in collection-folders without removing them from their parent book/article/etc.

b) The possibility to generate reports from those collections, such that the content of the single notes is shown together with a reference to their respective parent. (This reference could be citation style, eg. author & title.)

c) The possibility to generate a bibliography of the parents of the notes.

Why do I need this?
I use notes to store excerpts from books. I would then like to drag and drop the excerpts of several books into collections, according to the different topics/chapters I am working on. The reports would then be a basis for my writing of a text and citing the different books.

Short Example:
1) I have 3 books in my library and each book has 20-something childnotes containing excerpts.
2) I create collection called "my new book" and two subcolletions called "chapter1" and "chapter2".
3) I look through my excerpts and drag'n drop some of them into "chapter1" and some of them into "chapter2".
4) I generate a report on "chapter1" and start writing on my new book.

[update:] https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/672 seems to address this requested feature. Please give it higher priority.

noksagt

Can't you just use tags for some of that? Have tags for 'chapter1' 'chapter2', etc. Tag notes accordingly. Create a saved search to have it behave like collections.

The only hiccup seems to be that create bib/report from saved search creates a report for all items (including siblings that don't match). You can see what matches in the middle pane & manually select these fairly quickly, though.

zmg

No, I thought about this, but tags won't do it. One advantage of collections is, that they are hierachical. Also this dragging and dropping is much more intuitive: For example I could have a bunch of collections on some topics. Then while planing the chapter of a book or my thesis, I could go into "topic1" and look for the appropriate excerpt and drag it into "chapter1".
But most important: If use a single note in lot of different chapters, topics, articles (and this can happen, cause my thesis will I take me some years and I will produce a lot of texts) then all this tagging will be quite messy.

(@noksagt: sorry for the double post: you've been too fast in answering.)

noksagt

I will point out that:

There aren't true hierarchical tags, but you could still use "poor man's" hierarchical tags ('book1/chapter1', etc.). There have been requests for hierarchical tags.

And tags do have drag-and-drop support.

Presumably hierarchical tag support would clear up some of the mess with collections.

But I can see why you would want interface improvements.

zmg

hallo noksagt: Thank you for your answers! Hm ... Do you know if the developers are working on that kind feature? I could really use it ... I found a lot of postings requesting a similar thing. I tested zotero1.5 but it's not in there right now.

noksagt

I'll note that I'm not on the development team, so you can probably figure out the plans just as well as I can.

I'm also not sure which specific feature that you are referring to.

Hierarchical tags and/or bundling of related tags has been proposed a few times, but I am not aware of real planning. There is a weighted tag cloud in 1.5, which already improves tag management.

I could see leveraging this to improve the tag interface further (a threshold to display tags at all (either by number of citations or by imposing a maximum number of displayed tags), re-scaling based on the maximum entry in a subset of the cloud (so that when you filter on a tag (say 'book1/' in the "poor man's hierarchical tag support" that I described), the sizes rescale), etc.) But I don't know what is planned.

As above, drag-and-drop tags are already supported.

I don't know off the top of my head what other note-specific features are planned.

jonbean

Until Zotero can export notes to word, rtf, or Ooo, then it won't match what I've created with other big managers. Zotero is A+ for gathering citations, the notetaking is ok, but exporting to HTML only is a real dog.

Here's hoping that notetaking becomes a big focus -- particularly the export feature.

fbennett

Working with the statutes tool that I mentioned over on zotero-dev, it looks like one of its most powerful features will be the ability to do fine-grained searches within a statute or collection of statutes. This thread resulted in the current functionality. I'd like to return to it on one item that was left pending in this discussion.

Because there are lots of attachments in a statute item, with only a few hits, we can't pick up at a glance which provisions in the listing are relevant to the current search term, which would be a very big win for efficiency. The "ellipsis" method floated by Elena and noted by Dan would be a perfect solution for this use case.

Can a ticket be opened for it against 2.1?

fbennett

The Zotero Item History plugin provides a framework that could be used to implement a notes management extension to Zotero. I don't need such a facility myself, but the code is available, if anyone wants to fork it or extend it in that direction.