Upgrade StorageConfusion about Notes field for attachments
The Zotero documentation linked below discusses how to add a note item as a child of an item, or as a stand-alone item.
https://www.zotero.org/support/notes
But there is a third type of note, which appears if you expand the item and select one of its attachments, such as a PDF. Such 'attachment notes'
* Do not have the 'edit in separate window' button, so there appears to be no way to break out attachment note panels from the main GUI.
* Do not appear as a new child-item, and are not listed or otherwise indicated under the 'notes' tab in the main item view.
* However, their presence can be inferred indirectly by turning on the 'Notes' column in the main UI, which reveals a counter - if the count exceeds the number of child notes, there must be an attachment note somewhere. And when you expand the view, the attachment shows a count of 1 if there is an attachment note.
* Very occasionally Zotero detects hyperlinks in the PDF inserts those in the attachment note. I find this confusing because now the note counter on items I haven't looked at yet is 1, not 0.
As a new user coming from Mendeley with its monolithic notes field, I appear to have accidentally used a mixture of child items and attachment notes. I would like to convert all my attachment notes to child items. Is that possible?
On the side of general suggestions
1. If attachment notes are indeed a kind of note, it would be really useful if they were linked from the main item's Notes tab. It's a little tricky to know if a given item has any right now. And the documentation above should probably mention this third type of note.
2. Perhaps this field should not be thought of as a note. In that case it should not be counted in the 'notes' column and it should probably be labelled something else to avoid users accidentally treating it as a notes field.
Thanks for a great reference manager.
https://www.zotero.org/support/notes
But there is a third type of note, which appears if you expand the item and select one of its attachments, such as a PDF. Such 'attachment notes'
* Do not have the 'edit in separate window' button, so there appears to be no way to break out attachment note panels from the main GUI.
* Do not appear as a new child-item, and are not listed or otherwise indicated under the 'notes' tab in the main item view.
* However, their presence can be inferred indirectly by turning on the 'Notes' column in the main UI, which reveals a counter - if the count exceeds the number of child notes, there must be an attachment note somewhere. And when you expand the view, the attachment shows a count of 1 if there is an attachment note.
* Very occasionally Zotero detects hyperlinks in the PDF inserts those in the attachment note. I find this confusing because now the note counter on items I haven't looked at yet is 1, not 0.
As a new user coming from Mendeley with its monolithic notes field, I appear to have accidentally used a mixture of child items and attachment notes. I would like to convert all my attachment notes to child items. Is that possible?
On the side of general suggestions
1. If attachment notes are indeed a kind of note, it would be really useful if they were linked from the main item's Notes tab. It's a little tricky to know if a given item has any right now. And the documentation above should probably mention this third type of note.
2. Perhaps this field should not be thought of as a note. In that case it should not be counted in the 'notes' column and it should probably be labelled something else to avoid users accidentally treating it as a notes field.
Thanks for a great reference manager.
Overall, I'd say that these embedded notes are a pretty minor feature that we don't think a lot about (and that maybe wouldn't exist if we were creating Zotero from scratch), but that some people find useful — probably mainly people who store multiple attachments under an item (e.g., supplemental materials). If you're generally only storing a single attachment under an item, it's probably best not to use them.
Showing an attachment note in the Notes tab isn't a bad idea, though.
By 'accidentally' I do indeed mean that I simply started typing into the wrong field. It's an easy mistake to make if you open a PDF by expanding the item and double-clicking the attachment. The attachment is then selected in the bibliography and you are presented with the notes panel in the GUI. The panel is -very- similar to what you would see if you had taken the additional step of creating a new note and selected that instead. The only difference is that the attachment note has a bit of PDF meta data listed up top.
I suppose the simplest workaround is to simply remove all attachment notes and configure ZotFile to not extract TOC. That's somewhat disappointing though as the TOC extraction is useful - at least in principle. In practice, it is not so useful because it does not show up in the "Notes" tab.
Would it be possible to have separate counts for attachment and parent item notes?