Zotero and the Readability bookmarklet

davide · April 5, 2009

I often improve the readability of long texts on the web with the Readability bookmarklet, then I capture it with Zotero. Works almost perfectly, 'cause apparently I can't make annotations on pages that went through the Readability bookmarklet. Couldn't figure out why, any clue? (Vista Home Basic, Firefox 3.0.8, Zotero 1.0.9)

By the by, if Zotero had a tool to make web pages more readable before capturing them it would be great!

acsr · September 23, 2012

Try using the WebDeveloper Extension for Firefox, then switch CSS to media Print an if you are lucky you get a much more simplified view. Adblockers also can lead to solutions.

For integration into the Zotero UI I would like to have a more post processing approach. In the UI :

* buttons that exclude parts of the site
* actions that start from the central content and ghost out everything else. Then reinclude as necessary. ( there is a similar approach in Apple Mail when you paste HTML. You can delete certain DIVs with delete Icons.

Undo is helpful during this process.
Then "burning" the changes or adding a simplified copy are the needed options.

Why careful post processing ?

Simply because proper scientific working should preserve the context. Readability produces nice looking output. But often you loose significant stuff without recognizing this.

This is not recognizable.

My 2 cent

adamsmith · September 23, 2012

The advantage of using Readability is that Zotero has a translator for it, so you often get pretty decent metadata import compared to simple snapshots.

What constitutes "proper scientific working" depends on why you're saving a site - in my, and I assume many other, disciplines, the context of a website is irrelevant and what matters is the text content, though I'm sure that it matters for other people and disciplines - that's why the default is to save the page as is, not using readability.

For the original poster - webpage annotation features are no longer maintained in Zotero, devs are looking for a more suitable solution that will work more reliably and also sync across machines, but I don't believe there is anything in site.

Having fancy post-processing of snapshots might certainly be nice - and if there is a good, cross-platform, open-source tool that does that in an intuitive way I'm sure devs would consider implementing it, but it's also non-essential, so it's not something that devs will spend time developing.