@bdarcus
Like? I'm curious. To me ticket 672 is a "certainly gotta happen sometime," along with some other things related to notes, (some dreams here). I don't have a feel for all of the priorities of the Zotero project to know whether it should be radically promoted, but at some point, by some means, it sure would be very useful to make notes more useful for the synthetic aspect of academic writing, e.g. by being able to manipulate them onscreen like index cards. (This may, I suspect, best be a job for an extension to Zotero).

Or are you just referring to the previous discussions on semantic markup in notes (structure, emphasis, lists, etc), as well as career-saving tags like "direct quote" or "lazy paraphrase here"?

@erazlogo and scot:

As you both know, there are a number of issues/possibilities with notes that have come up on the forums, with perhaps the most obvious being support for "rich text" (though I'd prefer more building on a subset of HTML than traditional desktop rich text), and for enhancing the semantics of notes and note linking.

To me those are more important priorities, or at the very least equal.

My "disagree" point goes back to the fact I'm really leery of turning Zotero into an outliner, which is what I'm hearing in this request. I really don't think it's at all straightforward to do this well, though I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Ideally, all of these issues would be designed together so that there's a compelling and tight vision behind enhancing notes.

@elena:

At the very least, notes in collections should be sortable in the same way they now are in reports--independently of parents and with short source info available.

I don't use the reports feature much, and am not seeing this. Is this a 1.5 feature?

Many messages in differents forums talk about the problem of notes and notetaking in Zotero. It's not easy to follow the discussion. If we can have a kind of resume of all these discussions it could help. Someone talk about: writing note, tagging note, searching notes, sorting notes, author for note, date for note, "localisation of note" (page in the "parent item" for exemple), template, display, publish, print notes, etc.
In the actual system, notes are like yellow "post it", short textes about anything, from "must read", quotation, comments, references to the first draft of an personnal essay in a standalone note...
I note that we have more than 50 types to describe an item, more than 50 fields to describe an item, more than 1000 styles to use in bibliography, and no type, no fields no style to describe and use our notes. We can tag notes, and we try to use tag in very imaginative way sometimes, but it doesn't make a standard system to use notes.
Is not easy to think about a standard langage to describe note: the contents of it and how people use it are very personnals.
I begin to use notes in a old Access database almost 10 years ago. I have thousands of it related to my collections of documents. Rapidly it became a mess: I can't sort it, find the last one I wrote, etc., similar as the discusion we have here. I find my homemade solution (it's not ideal and standard!), but I can really improve my notetaking when I start to think about note as a kind of document-item related (or not) with one or sometime many orthers document-item.
In that way, all my notes have now many other fields to describe it: an author (me), 2 dates (created, last access), statut (undone, done, in progress) tags, type (a choice of 8, the 2 most importants are: quotation, comments), localisation (page for books or papers), even I could ad a note to a note to write, for exemple, why I choose this quotation, what is the interest for me.
Zotero should think about notes in a very large perspective, not just a post it: it's a type of "textual item" that scholars produce in millions about items they read. There are many ideas, many very good, about notetaking in different forums. If we summarize all of it, we could probably make a good suggestion to how develop it.

I would like to give a short example on what sorting of single child notes into collections could be used for. One powerful application would be the outlinig of academic articles and books:

Example: You have lots publications in the zotero library grouped into collections and each publication has several childnotes containing excerpts.
You create a new collection called "my new book" and two subcolletions called "chapter1" and "chapter2".
You look through your excerpts and drag'n drop some of them into "chapter1" and some of them into "chapter2". You can even move them around from "chapter1" to "chapter2" or from an earlier written "old article".
When you are finished, you generate a reports on "chapter1" and "chapter2" and take this as a basis for writing your new book in your favourite word processor.

@bougau: I support your view, that Zotero should think about notes in a large perspective (e.g. formatting, sorting, author etc.), but I would like to add, that Zotero should always keep its ease of use in mind. The simplicity of Zotero's design is one of its really strong points.

@CB: I recently started using citavi which has quite powerful excerpt- and note-taking capabilities combined with source management. Drawback: English version and other OSs than Windows not before 2009. And it's not free.

You can't sort attachments, nor bibliographic items.

That's just not true--child items are not sortable independently of parents, but parents are certainly sortable--in the middle column, by author, date, title, etc. Sorting notes/attachments by title in the same way, and viewing them independently of parents, is not outlining. This is related to another request, to view only found items in a saved search, without parents or children that don't match the term--that also has nothing to do with outlining.

As you both know, there are a number of issues/possibilities with notes that have come up on the forums, with perhaps the most obvious being support for "rich text" (though I'd prefer more building on a subset of HTML than traditional desktop rich text), and for enhancing the semantics of notes and note linking.

I agree with Bruce. Many have requested this from the very few months of the first release, about two years ago. Personally, I don't see how sorting the notes would be more important, though it also would be useful.

Has this been worked on yet? can we hope for a feature allowing child items to be sortable independently of parent items any time soon? it would be REALLY crucial for my thesis. Right now I have to basically do it manually...

Please, please, please give ticket 672 (https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/672) higher priority.

Any progress on this front? This doesn't count, as it is perhaps possible (not easy) to organize your notes into something resembling (but not functioning as) an outline (and certainly not an outline proper). I was surprised and disappointed after more than a year away from active research to see zotero still unable to implement this most basic function for historical research.

Unless I've missed something, I'll stick to using zotero as a mere bibliography manager and will use zotero-footnoted quotations in Microsoft Word to produce the sort of scaffolding-style outlines I'm looking for. I very much wish this could all take place within Z.

If there's an opportunity to contribute directly to funding the implementation of ticket 672, I'd gladly throw as much as $100 at the effort if there were enough other people able to bring the total up to an amount worth the developers' time. I understand there are all sorts of other priorities, but this one would be a real game-changer for many of us, and has been a frustrating step backward from the state of technology several years ago with scribe.

Hopefully,
Isaac

This might be of interest as an example of how to handle FOSS bounties: http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/news/2011-05-02-foss_factory.html