Margin Note Features

rjmckayiv
Zotero is tantalizingly close to offering a digital version of scribbling in the margins easily. Right now you can do it by anotating a snapshot, but what would be really great is if when you saved a document to Zotero, it automatically displayed the whole thing as a snapshot in which you could navigate between pages (in a JSTOR document, say) while leaving annotations in the margins. This should replace the "Notes" feature, which is relatively useless as it allows you to take notes only on the whole document, without tying them to the specific passage they comment on.

I would just love it if Zotero would save the webpages you put in it automatically, in a format that allows you to make margin notes tied to specific places in the document. These margin notes should also be searchable. The idea is to have a free, web-based version of Acrobat Pro's commenting ability.

Thanks, and please let me know if this ever happens.
  • Tjowens
    If I am reading your comment right you would like to annotate PDFs in the same way you annotate web pages. While we would like to offer this feature and it might seem like a trivial task it is actually somewhat complicated. There are several issues at hand, but most importantly because Firefox does not offer a native way to view PDFs we do not have a consistent frame to interact with them. At some point this may change in which case we would be love to add this kind of feature.
  • fourth
    What I meant is actually more that It'd be nice to be able to annotate webpages without turning them into snapshots. You would be able to save a page in Zotero, write notes ON it, and have them still be there when you opened it again through Zotero.
  • dstillman
    There's no guarantee that a page will be the same—or even exist—the next time you visit it, which is why you annotate snapshots and not live web pages.
  • fourth
    That's a good point, but what I was thinking was that Zotero could AUTOMATICALLY make snapshots of any page you opened, and save those with your annotations. Right now, you have to make and then view the snapshot, and all the pages and snapshots clutter up your folder. It might be a pain for Zotero to write software that would automatically find all the pages of a JSTOR article, say, and make them into snapshots that are linked in the same way the real pages are, but I think if it's feasible it would make the service a lot better. Thanks for all the feedback.
  • scot
    edited March 21, 2008
    Would you really rather get all the pages of a JSTOR article separately? I think one of the best features of Zotero is that it can get (1) biblibliographic information, and (2) the high-quality PDF from JSTOR... in a single click. Then the PDF is instantly available for full-text searching and for viewing in any PDF viewer I want--they typically have a lot more viewing options than the browser pane (which would have the article in a single resolution, for example). Besides that, printing an article that was saved pagewise would be a lot of work, and if I'm not mistaken the resolution would be horrible.

    This is not to impugn your original suggestion, which is excellent (annotate PDFs and keep those annotations within Zotero for searchability, etc). It's just that this is out of reach of the Zotoro developers for the moment.
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