Upgrade StorageZotero for iOS Beta
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Edit: iPhone
A feature I REALLY desire is highlighting as convenent as possible because most papers contain the text layers. The beta version so far is wonderful except that the highlight process is cumbersome in a sense... I just want to press the sentence for a short while e.g. 2 seconds to make the sentence get highlighted. Furthermore, color of this highlight annotation should be easily changed through just another click... and no overlapping highlightings of the same color! They should be merged into an annotation.
Thx!
It looks very good.
I can't open pdfs on the iPad. I'm not sure why. I sync files in My Library using Zotero, and sync attachment files in group libraries using Zotero storage.
However, I do currently use Zotfile to transfer files from Zotero to my iPad and back using a Dropbox folder location. Is that the problem?
Is there an error in my web connection or a bug?
I still miss document thumbnails preview (when their is a PDF or website capture) on Zotero and in mobile it would be even more critical.
I'm curious about annotations and further plans for them. Would it be possible to use the iOS (iPadOS?) built-in annotation tool, like when a PDF is opened from "Files"? It has all kinds of tools and settings for writing in the pdf with a pencil. Then these drawings just get saved to the pdf, and are available for any other reader on any platform.
(Otherwise I'm very happy with the app, and so grateful it exists! Makes my life much easier)
I can envision this being realized through the share function of iOS. So first by sharing it to an external pdf reader. After annotating it, I would like to share it back to Zotero and select which item I want this attachment to be linked to, and I would also like to choose whether I want to replace the old attachment with this newly annotated one under this item.
As mentioned by a few others, it would be great to be able to scribble on the PDFs as well, but this is probably hard to implement.
I also agree that some more view options would be nice: fit to with was mentioned above, some other nice examples are used by koreader, such as „fit to column and read column by column“, which essentially turns two-column articles into single column ones.
Another useful view is „recently read articles“ and tabs for multiple articles.
I will buy Zotero storage now and hope the app will be scaling reliably to thousands of articles :) One thing which was always frustrating in Mendeley was that the sync was mysterious on large libraries and if something didn‘t sync, it was very intransparent why not. I trust Zotero will be much better.
Last but not least, I am torn between the in-PDF and the in-database annotations. On the one hand, in-PDF is a lot more flexible, I can use almost any app, in particular also on android. But syncing is much less efficient and PDF standards are very messy. On the other hand, in-database is fast, has more flexibility in remaining editable and searchable. Currently, both is possible, which is quite risky. What happens to the database annotations when a file is modified externally, will the file still be recognised in the built-in viewer? When exporting database annotations as in-PDF, opening and editing elsewhere and reimporting the file, will there be double annotations? Can the external annotations which are usually recognised by Zotfile and attached as notes, instead in the future be „cleaned‘ from the PDF and moved to database annotations? Will other apps such as Zoo (Android Zotero) support database annotations? Can the koreader annotations (which are stored in a secondary file) be converted to database annotations and vice-versa? I don‘t have good answers to all these points but it shows that this is quite an ambitious undertaking.
- I downloaded a bunch of PDFs to have them on the iPad, but after downloading they all popped open. It would be good to download them in the background without opening after they are downloaded.
- When I want to annotate I need to click the "..." to open an additional menu. Here I have two issues. Firstly, I don't like that the menu opens up "small" and then expands which takes nearly 1s. Secondly, I think that colors and a delete button are so frequently used, that they shouldn't be behind this second menu and should be available right after pressing on an annotation.
I think one of the excellent function for iPad is that it has Apple Pencil. Therefore pls consider adding the iOS build-in pencil toolkit to the PDF editor.
Thx to the team.