Feature Requests: iOS beta annotations and highlighting text

cberrigan
I'm super excited for the iOS beta and PDF reader / annotator. Thank you!

Feature requests (or maybe I haven't figure them out yet):

- When highlighting text in the iOS beta PDF reader, it would be great to have a pop-up with multiple options immediately available. Including: speak text out loud, define, highlight, comment, copy text into note, web search.

- It would be great to have preferences available for how to handle highlights. For me on the iPad, I would love to be able to select text, hit "highlight," and have that text automatically copied into a comment / note. One-step highlight and comment. (When you're working with your finger, it's nice to be economical with your gestures.) I imagine not everyone would want that, so perhaps it could be an option in the preferences?

- Ability to export the annotations from both desktop & iOS app

Many thanks!
  • cberrigan
    Update: THANK YOU so much for making the initial changes to the text highlighting in the PDF reader! It's so much more useful now, and the text-to-speech is promising.

    A few additional requests for future development:

    - Please add a "define" or "look-up" button, as in the Apple Books app or Mendeley. The nice thing in these apps is that definitions from all system-installed dictionaries appear, enabling meanings and definitions across multiple languages at once, which can be super helpful.

    - Also the further option to search the web if the word cannot be found.

    - The ability to choose in preferences the voice engines for the text-to-speech, and reading speed. Especially for different languages. I think this would be a great addition to accessibility.

    - It's still unclear to me how to export annotations, either from the iOS app or from the Desktop.

    Many thanks again!
    Caitlin
  • dstillman
    Look Up will be in the next build. You can search the web from the same popup.

    Text-to-speech settings are OS-level Accessibility settings.

    You can export PDFs on iOS using the standard share button in the PDF reader, and in the desktop app from the File menu (which currently will include annotations) or by dragging from the items list as you always could before (which won't include annotations). You can also include PDFs with or without annotations with standard bibliographic exports. There will be additional options in the future.
  • cberrigan
    I changed the text-to-speech voice in the iPad settings, but this did not update in the Zotero iOS beta. Even after restarting the iPad, and after updating Zotero.

    I still think it would make it more accessible if it's possible to change the voice settings within the iOS app. For example, I'd like to read an article in Spanish, but my iPad settings are all in English. So I would have to select a different speech engine and adjust the default language for my iPad. It's not very accessible to have to change the default text-to-speech settings for my whole iPad just to read one article in a different language.

    Thanks!
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