@eporte: A third-party Android app would have access to the annotations via the API, but it would obviously be quite a lot of work to implement a PDF reader with similar features.
Two feature requests... First, in the iOS version I'd love to see some sort of 'distraction free' reading and annotation mode for PDFs, currently there's not a great option available... PDF Expert is okay, but that's about it.
Second, as a grad student I find myself on the receiving end of a lot of poorly scanned and formatted PDFs and have been relying on OCRmyPDF (https://ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) to split and clean them. Echoing an earlier poster's comment about editing page numbering as well. Being able to do this within Zotero, rather than from Terminal or with a couple Automator scripts would be really handy.
@dstillman : Thank you for your response. Access to annotations is already an important thing that will allow you to consult your work. But it is true that the development of quality tablets (including e-ink) makes you want to be able to annotate in mobility and find everything in Zotero. This would make a very powerful annotation ecosystem. But it's true that it's a lot of work. And a solution for extracting the highlighted passages and then reintegrating them into the metadata of the new annotation panel would be complicated ?
@dstillman : Hi, me again. I think the idea of offering the possibility to add tags to the highlighted passages is excellent. It makes you want to use zotero to search for quotes by theme... excellent. On the other hand, for it to be complete, you would have to be able to put a quote within a quotation. Sometimes a long passage is interesting on one subject but a shorter excerpt within that passage is interesting for another subject.
"Add ctrl+z support for PDF highlights". second this! and can you allow to select multiple annotations to be selected for deletion etc. on the left bar?
"Add ctrl+z support for PDF highlights". second this!
While this is planned, note that you can also just click the annotation in the PDF and press Delete on your keyboard — you don't have to go to the sidebar.
can you allow to select multiple annotations to be selected for deletion etc. on the left bar?
When closing a PDF, the UI in Zotero should switch to the library - not to the next PDF opened.
@safonso: We won't do this, but we'll implement tab jumpback as in Firefox, so that if you open a new tab and then close it, you return to the opener (which may be the library). If you move between tabs before closing, closing the tab will still select the next tab.
Would be great to restore the open tabs when Zotero is restarted.
Search in PDF do not highlight words.
Some small issues: - I believe the "my library" tab could be much smaller and replaced by a "home" icon. That would save some place for the other tabs. Would be nice to have a shortcut to jump to this "my library" tab. - You can move tab by dragging them, but the cursor do not change has an hand cursor and stay as a pointer. - When you open a note from "all notes" in the sidebar, that would be cool if you can open the related paper in some way. For example by double clicking on the title of the paper visible on top of the note.
Would be great to restore the open tabs when Zotero is restarted.
This is planned.
Search in PDF do not highlight words.
This will be fixed soon.
You can move tab by dragging them, but the cursor do not change has an hand cursor and stay as a pointer.
The cursor doesn't usually change when programs do this, but some sort of UI feedback is normal, and we'll try to have that in a future version.
When you open a note from "all notes" in the sidebar, that would be cool if you can open the related paper in some way. For example by double clicking on the title of the paper visible on top of the note.
Yes, it will be possible in an upcoming version to quickly get back to the library view from a note.
@llity: Not totally sure what you mean, but you can switch to viewing multiple pages at once from the View menu by selecting Odd Spreads or Even Spreads.
Bug report for the beta: Not sure if this has been noticed yet, but notes in 5.0.97 are automatically correcting "[number] + [.] + [space]" to "1." Thus, "2." becomes "1." if a space is added after the period.
This is especially annoying for users, like myself, who use numbers to hierarchize child notes. Any attempt to input numbers into notes is now extremely cumbersome.
I assume this is an attempt to ease the creation of numbered lists, but its really messing with my work-flow. Any chance this will be corrected in the next update?
Bug report for the beta: Not sure if this has been noticed yet, but notes in 5.0.97 are automatically correcting "[number] + [.] + [space]" to "1." Thus, "2." becomes "1." if a space is added after the period.
@polsenharbich You are right, we will make it transform to list only when '1. ' is entered.
Hi @dstillman, I have a similar comment as @mrcuriosity. I agree with you that ‘export files’ can be used to include the annotations done in Zotero viewer to the actual PDF file. However, what I wish for is that once I annotate and close my PDF in Zotero viewer, the annotations get saved to the actual PDF automatically. That way, it could get synced by Zotfile so that Zotfile can extract the annotations. Also, if I move to another device and open the pdf on a native pdf reader such as Adobe, I would then be able to see those annotations that I added in Zotero viewer.
I am not sure if this is already possible. I’d love to know how if so! P.S: I love the new reader, and cannot wait for iPad app to launch!
Thank you for the new PDF editor! It works really well already. Here are some minor issues that I've noticed so far:
1. In the search function in the notes pressing enter key doesn't initiate a search as I'd expect.
2. Highlighting text in a PDF is jumpy (I'm not sure how to describe it better), i.e. the light blue highlight bar doesn't always follow the cursor where I'm trying to point it at.
3. When browsing through notes with down arrow key, the cursor gets stuck at a citation right before the first parenthesis. You get past the citation with right arrow key, but this isn't an intuitive solution.
4. Is there a way to prevent notes from transforming "1. " into a list automatically? I often just want to write number+period without making a list.
However, what I wish for is that once I annotate and close my PDF in Zotero viewer, the annotations get saved to the actual PDF automatically. That way, it could get synced by Zotfile so that Zotfile can extract the annotations.
No, that makes no sense — you can already generate notes from these new annotations in Zotero. This functionality replaces ZotFile's annotation extraction functionality.
It's not possible to mirror annotations to the main file without causing problems. See this answer of mine, and post to that thread with further questions.
This update is great! However, I agree with @Venkataragavan. I would love to option to have the annotations automatically saved onto the PDF file directly. There is too much friction now in order to export the PDF annotations and convert them to markdown for further processing in other apps.
If automatically saving is not possible, I would love a button that would allow me to export a PDF to the current folder in Zotero. Right now, the export PDF option brings up my downloads folder in a Window. It's way too difficult to navigate to the Zotero files.
Just to add on the search function. The search does highlight all the results in the notes. What I was looking for is jumping from one highlighted word to another by pressing enter key in the same way as pressing "Next" in the search pane. Jumping through search hits this way is usually quicker than scrolling through the note looking for the highlighted words.
I would love to option to have the annotations automatically saved onto the PDF file directly.
That's not possible — see my link above.
But you'll be able to export annotations directly from Zotero. Zotero can already add all PDF annotations into a new note. You can copy that text to the clipboard already, and there'll be other export options for notes in the future. There's no need to transfer via embedded annotations in a PDF file to get the content of your annotations into a document.
I would love a button that would allow me to export a PDF to the current folder in Zotero.
I'm not sure what what you mean by "current folder". There's no such thing in Zotero. But the filepicker should remember your last-used folder. It does for me on macOS, but I think we can make that more reliable elsewhere.
@Jvanhala: Oh, sorry, you're referring to notes, not the PDF reader (where highlighting is indeed broken but Enter goes to the next match). We'll fix that for notes.
Loving the beta, and the pdf reader is great. I particularly love the ability to keep a figure or table as a note.
Would suggest a few things.
1) highlighting should have the option for transparency. I much prefer a more transparent highlight and its typically offered on most pdf readers
2) creature comfort, highlights that look natural, with random variability on the edges
3) allow for differing thickness of the highlights
For the iOS app.
Please include similar highlight features. Also, please allow for dimming the pdf view only and locking that. Papership now doesn't allow that but I hate a glaring blasting white screen when reading papers.
This is an excellent update!!!! It would be very useful (and maybe not difficult) to include the "Previous" and "Next" view navigation buttons. Thank you!
"No, that makes no sense — you can already generate notes from these new annotations in Zotero. This functionality replaces ZotFile's annotation extraction functionality."
I agree. Your new annotations feature is great. The thing that is missing is a nicely formatted extraction to markdown that can also maintain the linked references to the the PDF. The extraction could be to file and even have copy and paste to memory. Is that something you are planning to add?
My current use case is: PDF annotate -> Zotfile Extract annotations -> mdnotes save as markdown -> copy and paste into Obsidian.
If you can replace that workflow then that would be great!
Upgrade Storage
Two feature requests... First, in the iOS version I'd love to see some sort of 'distraction free' reading and annotation mode for PDFs, currently there's not a great option available... PDF Expert is okay, but that's about it.
Second, as a grad student I find myself on the receiving end of a lot of poorly scanned and formatted PDFs and have been relying on OCRmyPDF (https://ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) to split and clean them. Echoing an earlier poster's comment about editing page numbering as well. Being able to do this within Zotero, rather than from Terminal or with a couple Automator scripts would be really handy.
and can you allow to select multiple annotations to be selected for deletion etc. on the left bar?
Search in PDF do not highlight words.
Some small issues:
- I believe the "my library" tab could be much smaller and replaced by a "home" icon. That would save some place for the other tabs. Would be nice to have a shortcut to jump to this "my library" tab.
- You can move tab by dragging them, but the cursor do not change has an hand cursor and stay as a pointer.
- When you open a note from "all notes" in the sidebar, that would be cool if you can open the related paper in some way. For example by double clicking on the title of the paper visible on top of the note.
This is especially annoying for users, like myself, who use numbers to hierarchize child notes. Any attempt to input numbers into notes is now extremely cumbersome.
I assume this is an attempt to ease the creation of numbered lists, but its really messing with my work-flow. Any chance this will be corrected in the next update?
Kindly,
Peter
I am not sure if this is already possible. I’d love to know how if so! P.S: I love the new reader, and cannot wait for iPad app to launch!
1. In the search function in the notes pressing enter key doesn't initiate a search as I'd expect.
2. Highlighting text in a PDF is jumpy (I'm not sure how to describe it better), i.e. the light blue highlight bar doesn't always follow the cursor where I'm trying to point it at.
3. When browsing through notes with down arrow key, the cursor gets stuck at a citation right before the first parenthesis. You get past the citation with right arrow key, but this isn't an intuitive solution.
4. Is there a way to prevent notes from transforming "1. " into a list automatically? I often just want to write number+period without making a list.
It's not possible to mirror annotations to the main file without causing problems. See this answer of mine, and post to that thread with further questions.
If automatically saving is not possible, I would love a button that would allow me to export a PDF to the current folder in Zotero. Right now, the export PDF option brings up my downloads folder in a Window. It's way too difficult to navigate to the Zotero files.
Just to add on the search function. The search does highlight all the results in the notes. What I was looking for is jumping from one highlighted word to another by pressing enter key in the same way as pressing "Next" in the search pane. Jumping through search hits this way is usually quicker than scrolling through the note looking for the highlighted words.
But you'll be able to export annotations directly from Zotero. Zotero can already add all PDF annotations into a new note. You can copy that text to the clipboard already, and there'll be other export options for notes in the future. There's no need to transfer via embedded annotations in a PDF file to get the content of your annotations into a document. I'm not sure what what you mean by "current folder". There's no such thing in Zotero. But the filepicker should remember your last-used folder. It does for me on macOS, but I think we can make that more reliable elsewhere.
Would suggest a few things.
1) highlighting should have the option for transparency. I much prefer a more transparent highlight and its typically offered on most pdf readers
2) creature comfort, highlights that look natural, with random variability on the edges
3) allow for differing thickness of the highlights
For the iOS app.
Please include similar highlight features. Also, please allow for dimming the pdf view only and locking that. Papership now doesn't allow that but I hate a glaring blasting white screen when reading papers.
There need a button to open the PDF file with external PDF software.
It would be very useful (and maybe not difficult) to include the "Previous" and "Next" view navigation buttons.
Thank you!
"No, that makes no sense — you can already generate notes from these new annotations in Zotero. This functionality replaces ZotFile's annotation extraction functionality."
I agree. Your new annotations feature is great. The thing that is missing is a nicely formatted extraction to markdown that can also maintain the linked references to the the PDF. The extraction could be to file and even have copy and paste to memory. Is that something you are planning to add?
My current use case is: PDF annotate -> Zotfile Extract annotations -> mdnotes save as markdown -> copy and paste into Obsidian.
If you can replace that workflow then that would be great!