Sorting Tags: Special Characters

mhelvens
Hi all,

I just noticed a change in Zotero's behavior since I used it last, which is admittedly quite some time ago.

Some articles I imported already have their own tags, which get added to Zotero's tag cloud in the bottom left. But I also create my own tags, and I enclosed my tag-names in square brackets, e.g., [Modal Logic], because they would be sorted before the other tags (because "[" comes before "a").

But between then and now, Zotero started ignoring special characters for sorting, and [Modal Logic] is now once again located among the M tags, making my life a tiny bit more complicated.

Is there a way for me to fix this? Is there a way for the developers to fix this?

(PS: I cannot use the 'colored tag' feature for this, if only because I'm using way too many tags.)

Thanks!
  • dstillman
    edited March 10, 2017
    This change dates to 2014. (More details here.) Basically, Zotero does sort on initial punctuation, but it has an exception for certain characters — " ' [ { ( — that often appear in titles but that generally shouldn't affect sorting (and which I believe are rarely used the way you're trying to use brackets). We could sort tags differently and not ignore any characters for those, but you could address this just by using any other punctuation character.

    Note, too, that you can just turn off either the saving or displaying of automatic tags — the former in the preferences and the latter in the tag selector menu. And there might be other UI features that would make sense. Tags you create manually have a different internal type, so you shouldn't have to resort to hacks like punctuation to distinguish them.
  • mhelvens
    Thanks for the clarification!

    The "Show Automatic" option helps. Nonetheless, an option to sort automatic tags after manual tags, and make them somehow visually distinct, would be much appreciated. I'll add a feature request to GitHub, to be prioritized through your regular process.
  • mhelvens
    edited March 10, 2017
    Update: I just read your guidelines, and it seems you don't use GitHub for bug reports or feature requests. I should use this forum instead. For what it's worth, here's the text I wrote for the feature request:

    =====
    I would like to see a way to more easily distinguish between manual and automatic tags in the tag panel. To that end, I propose an option that triggers the following two effects:

    * Sort the manual tags before the automatic tags.
    * Add some visual hint to distinguish the two, like a 1px horizontal line separating them.
    =====
  • dstillman
    Not sure the exact approach we'll take, but issue created — I agree that, one way or another, the different tag types should be differentiated in the tag selector (as they are in the tag list for each item).
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