Any update on the capability to highlight PDF searches as CJAB mentioned? I think this feature would be hugely helpful to find quotes that I know I've read but I have simply misplaced or to find comments on a subject that I didn't know some authors have addressed.
Hi all - I am also very interested in seeing better search results displayed in Zotero. My team is starting to test Zotero since we are basically being forced to move from Mendeley but the search results in Zotero would be a huge step back and may be a deal-breaker for my team.
I agree with the last few commenters. The ability to search PDFs for phrases and the results show in text form would be great. It is the one thing Zotero lacks. Is this possible/in the works?
I've been turning to third-party solutions like FileLocatorPro for this kind of thing for a while now. Correct me if I'm mistaken, cjpoor, but it sounds like that's a search function for within a single pdf. I think the idea here is rather to have, in the advanced search looking at the full text index, a list of results not only of the items themselves but also a list of the individual hits within the text. So by selecting a result, you'd have an overview of all the mentions of the search term for a given pdf listed with context without having to open up the pdf and look manually.
Then again, FileLocatorPro does this very well and I'm not sure it would be easy to beat its functionality. Still, it doesn't necessarily allow using metadata and collections which is available to zotero to refine searches. So it's really not ideal.
How exactly does that work? I have the beta, but when I do an advanced search it just returns a list of hits but there's no way to actually see more details without opening up the pdfs one at a time.
Note that this is just the note search in the PDF view -- nothing about standard search and advanced search has changed yet:
If you click on the note icon at the top right of the PDF panel, there's a separate search window. Results from all notes across all items are returned for searches -- though it actually looks like it doesn't show search context, just the note title and first line and the parent item, so that's still not quite what we'd want.
@jeapordy I think what you are looking for is something that has been requested many times. The functionality is available in DocFetcher and Recoll, I believe. This would be the ability to search "Everything" and return results similar to the "notes" search that adamsmith referred to but covering all items and attachments, notes etc. in a collection. The pane of results would list all items etc. containing the query and display, if found, several snippets containing the highlighted query (within the pdf etc). Ideally one would then be able to open the desired items, pdfs, or notes in tabs. I use recoll in this way by getting it to index Zotero storage, but it would be a great addition to Zotero's features.
Agree with the prior commenters - the ability to show where the search terms appear and the relevant context from inside the PDF in the mean search results would be really helpful, and definitely speed up the quest for the perfect citation.
Upgrade Storage
See this thread: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/377322#Comment_377322
Then again, FileLocatorPro does this very well and I'm not sure it would be easy to beat its functionality. Still, it doesn't necessarily allow using metadata and collections which is available to zotero to refine searches. So it's really not ideal.
If you click on the note icon at the top right of the PDF panel, there's a separate search window. Results from all notes across all items are returned for searches -- though it actually looks like it doesn't show search context, just the note title and first line and the parent item, so that's still not quite what we'd want.