Feature Suggestion: Merge annotations

Flynn_Sullivan
I've been testing Zotero beta, and the PDF annotation features in particular. They're great, I love not having to open a seperate app. However, sometimes I want to highlight a sentence that extends across two pages, and that doesn't work cleanly if there are foot notes.

So if I could highlight each half of the sentence separately, then merge the two highlights, that would be great.
  • dstillman
    @martynas_b can confirm, but I don't think it's possible for a PDF annotation to span multiple pages. (If you try to highlight across multiple pages in macOS Preview, you end up with two separate annotations.)
  • dstillman
    edited May 9, 2021
    Granted, since these are our own annotations, we could fake this when viewed within Zotero, but we'd have to look into how complicated that would be. We're also a bit more limited in what we can do in the iOS app, and we wouldn't want to support something that didn't work well on a synced device.

    At the very least, if you exported to an external program, you'd necessarily end up with multiple annotations.
  • martynas_b
    Displaying two or more annotations (from different pages) as a single annotation, probably, won't happen because there are too many complications with this. We could only consider to allow them grouping somehow. Having another text between the annotations complicates things even more.
  • Flynn_Sullivan
    grouping would also solve my problem, that would be cool for all sorts of other applications too. like picking out key lines in arguments.
  • joycekwc
    I understand the difficulty with merging annotations from different pages, but occasionally I find myself finding it difficult to highlight an annotation consecutively on a single page (for example, on my smaller laptop screen or mobile, I start highlighting only to discover that the annotation needs to go beyond what is visible). To keep the annotation together, at present, I have to delete the original annotation, and scroll/zoom to make the annotation appear, then re-highlight. Would merging annotations for that use case be possible (even if this is far down the list of things to do?)
  • matiaslaporte
    edited March 23, 2022
    I second the previous comment. My use of Apple Pencil is a bit finicky and I lose contact with the screen quite often, resulting on highlights of what I would like them to be, which then requires three more clicks to delete, plus one more sliding of a new highlight.

    I would understand the possibility of someone wanting/needing composite highlighting. Perhaps there could be a setting where one chooses how this behavior should work?

    As an example, the app Documents by Readdle has a working highlighter merging (but lots of other problems, naturally ;) ).
  • dstillman
    edited March 23, 2022
    We'll look into it merging highlights on the same page.

    (Just to note, you can already merge ink annotations, though not highlight annotations, from the sidebar in the iOS app.)
  • alexander_b
    edited May 12, 2022
    I agree that merging or grouping multiple highlights would be useful, both on the same pages as well as on multiple pages. Currently, when manually editing the page number of a specific annotation, you can set it to a range of pages (e.g. "9-10") and the citation will be correctly shown as "pp. 9-10" when exporting the note. This could automatically happen when highlights on multiple pages are grouped.

    Regarding merging/grouping highlights with text in-between, Zotero could automatically insert an ellipsis in (square) brackets.
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