Upgrade StorageAvailable in preview: Zotero PDF reader and new note editor
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Two feature requests... First, in the iOS version I'd love to see some sort of 'distraction free' reading and annotation mode for PDFs, currently there's not a great option available... PDF Expert is okay, but that's about it.
Second, as a grad student I find myself on the receiving end of a lot of poorly scanned and formatted PDFs and have been relying on OCRmyPDF (https://ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) to split and clean them. Echoing an earlier poster's comment about editing page numbering as well. Being able to do this within Zotero, rather than from Terminal or with a couple Automator scripts would be really handy.
and can you allow to select multiple annotations to be selected for deletion etc. on the left bar?
Search in PDF do not highlight words.
Some small issues:
- I believe the "my library" tab could be much smaller and replaced by a "home" icon. That would save some place for the other tabs. Would be nice to have a shortcut to jump to this "my library" tab.
- You can move tab by dragging them, but the cursor do not change has an hand cursor and stay as a pointer.
- When you open a note from "all notes" in the sidebar, that would be cool if you can open the related paper in some way. For example by double clicking on the title of the paper visible on top of the note.
This is especially annoying for users, like myself, who use numbers to hierarchize child notes. Any attempt to input numbers into notes is now extremely cumbersome.
I assume this is an attempt to ease the creation of numbered lists, but its really messing with my work-flow. Any chance this will be corrected in the next update?
Kindly,
Peter
I am not sure if this is already possible. I’d love to know how if so! P.S: I love the new reader, and cannot wait for iPad app to launch!
1. In the search function in the notes pressing enter key doesn't initiate a search as I'd expect.
2. Highlighting text in a PDF is jumpy (I'm not sure how to describe it better), i.e. the light blue highlight bar doesn't always follow the cursor where I'm trying to point it at.
3. When browsing through notes with down arrow key, the cursor gets stuck at a citation right before the first parenthesis. You get past the citation with right arrow key, but this isn't an intuitive solution.
4. Is there a way to prevent notes from transforming "1. " into a list automatically? I often just want to write number+period without making a list.
It's not possible to mirror annotations to the main file without causing problems. See this answer of mine, and post to that thread with further questions.
If automatically saving is not possible, I would love a button that would allow me to export a PDF to the current folder in Zotero. Right now, the export PDF option brings up my downloads folder in a Window. It's way too difficult to navigate to the Zotero files.
Just to add on the search function. The search does highlight all the results in the notes. What I was looking for is jumping from one highlighted word to another by pressing enter key in the same way as pressing "Next" in the search pane. Jumping through search hits this way is usually quicker than scrolling through the note looking for the highlighted words.
But you'll be able to export annotations directly from Zotero. Zotero can already add all PDF annotations into a new note. You can copy that text to the clipboard already, and there'll be other export options for notes in the future. There's no need to transfer via embedded annotations in a PDF file to get the content of your annotations into a document. I'm not sure what what you mean by "current folder". There's no such thing in Zotero. But the filepicker should remember your last-used folder. It does for me on macOS, but I think we can make that more reliable elsewhere.
Would suggest a few things.
1) highlighting should have the option for transparency. I much prefer a more transparent highlight and its typically offered on most pdf readers
2) creature comfort, highlights that look natural, with random variability on the edges
3) allow for differing thickness of the highlights
For the iOS app.
Please include similar highlight features. Also, please allow for dimming the pdf view only and locking that. Papership now doesn't allow that but I hate a glaring blasting white screen when reading papers.
There need a button to open the PDF file with external PDF software.
It would be very useful (and maybe not difficult) to include the "Previous" and "Next" view navigation buttons.
Thank you!
"No, that makes no sense — you can already generate notes from these new annotations in Zotero. This functionality replaces ZotFile's annotation extraction functionality."
I agree. Your new annotations feature is great. The thing that is missing is a nicely formatted extraction to markdown that can also maintain the linked references to the the PDF. The extraction could be to file and even have copy and paste to memory. Is that something you are planning to add?
My current use case is: PDF annotate -> Zotfile Extract annotations -> mdnotes save as markdown -> copy and paste into Obsidian.
If you can replace that workflow then that would be great!