Info tab needs a facelift

wouterstomp
Would it be possible to enhance the UI of the info tab a bit? Some simple improvements could make it much more beautiful and readable:

- Title font larger and bold
- Author fields combined in one list of authors (when not editing them)
- Journal, volume, number, pages and date fields combined
- Don't display the title of the field, but use the whole column for the obvious ones such as those mentioned above
- Thumbnail of the pdf

Papers (for mac) does this pretty well, it would be nice to have a similar layout instead of the current very basic and bland one.
  • mronkko
    edited September 19, 2011
    - Title font larger and bold
    I like this idea as well.
    - Author fields combined in one list of authors (when not editing them)
    - Journal, volume, number, pages and date fields combined
    - Don't display the title of the field, but use the whole column for the obvious ones such as those mentioned above
    This is a matter of preference. Some people (including me) like the fact that the user interface makes it clear which fields the item has and what their values are. What would be the advantage in combining the authors and how would you edit this kind of field? Same goes for the information about the journal or other publication where the item appears.
    - Thumbnail of the pdf
    This has been discussed a couple of times on the forums. See e.g.
    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/12012/preview-pane/

    I think the problem with this feature is that there is (as far as I know) an easy cross-platform way to generate the thumbnails for the PDFs.
  • adamsmith
    I like the idea of somehow lifting out the title - I'm not sure I'm excited about bold (The field titles are bold already) but larger and italics, or different font or so I could well see.
    As noted above, what papers does is to use the title kind of as a heading (and without a label) - that does seem to work (and then bold would be fine, too).
    This is a matter of preference. Some people (including me) like the fact that the user interface makes it clear which fields the item has and what their values are. What would be the advantage in combining the authors and how would you edit this kind of field?
    The idea, I guess, would be that you minimize vertical space and have a view that's more intuitive and closer to the citation of an item. The fields could fan out when you click on them for editing.
    I'm undecided on this - the way Papers does this certainly looks slick, but I'm uncertain about actually working with it.
  • wouterstomp
    Here is a screenshot for people unfamiliar with the papers layout:

    http://www.smallersystems.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/papers.png

    The authors field could work just like the current author field, which already gives you two separate editing boxes depending on whether you click the first of last name of an author. It could do just this for each separate author.

    (or alternatively you could have an edit button for the whole info tab, which would expand to view all fields when editing, while contracting related fields and hiding empty ones when just viewing it)
  • Greg
    I am still hoping for some way to decide which fields are displayed and which ones are hidden.
    Three option would actually be great with some reasonable default setting for the people who don't want to get into the details:
    Always shown, shown when not empty, never shown.

    I actually think that would be a big UI improvement...
  • mark
    @Greg, see this ancient topic for a similar proposal and Dan Stillman's comments on it, which I may as well quote here:
    There's a ticket for this dating back to December 2006, and we've actually planned to implement it since the very beginning of the UI design, but obviously it hasn't happened yet.
    Last action on that ticket was ten months ago when a milestone for Z2.0 was deleted...

    More generally, I very much like wouterstomp's proposals and fully agree that the info tab could do with a makeover.
  • Gracile
    Some people (including me) like the fact that the user interface makes it clear which fields the item has and what their values are.
    +1.
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