Hi - thanks for this great program, I like it a lot & I think I will be using this a lot!!!
Is there a reason there are only 9 colors? I was highlighting in Adobe which has the possiblity for a lot more colors, but htey were getting grouped (green + light green, for example)
I found the color section and increased the number of color steps (though not with great naming) // define color category based on HSL if (l < 0.12) return "Black"; if (l > 0.98) return "White"; if (s < 0.2) return "Gray"; if (h < 15) return "Red"; if (h < 30) return "RedOrange"; if (h < 45) return "Orange"; if (h < 55) return "YellowOrange"; if (h < 65) return "Yellow"; if (h < 85) return "YellowGreen"; if (h < 125) return "BrightGreen"; if (h < 155) return "MintGreen"; if (h < 170) return "Green"; if (h < 180) return "GreenCyan"; if (h < 190) return "Cyan"; if (h < 230) return "RoyalBlue"; if (h < 270) return "Blue"; if (h < 300) return "Lavender"; if (h < 335) return "Magenta"; return "Red";
@saris_anne Do I undstand correctly that you were able to increase the number of allowed colored tags to an arbitrary amount? Could you perhaps give more details on what you achieved and how you did it? :)
@adamsmith For me, 9 colors is actually plenty. The only thing I really need is to have more than one tag of the same color. People could, for example, use orange tags for all the different classes they teach. So when they see an item with an orange dot, they know it was used for teaching and if they want to, they can click on the item to see the specific class (=tag) it belongs to.
In my case, I would use orange tags for all the items that I already cited in a text I wrote in the past and green tags for items that I have cited already in the context of a WIP. Then, when I'm done writing the current WIP, I can convert all the green tags to orange tags.
For this to be reasonable, it's necessary to remove (or make customizable) the feature that all colored tags stick to the tag selector by default. The display of the tag list could be much improved itself (even just reducing the top and bottom margins would do a lot), but that's another topic.
more coloured tags please. I use 30 something tags with a kind of a hierarchy and need to do it somehow, colours would be the best solution, not 30 plus colours, I can use same colours for various of the tags. for instance 9 are same level, 10 other level and so on. What I need is to be able to address a greater number of tags with colours already there
I agree with @andreygirardi and @G-Radiation on this, there should be an ability to assign different tags with the same colour. I have just discovered I can't currently do this and think it needs to be changed. I'm glad others think the same
I agree with @SCockerill, allowing us to put different tags under one unique color could allow to make "sub fields" or "families" of references, which could be very helpful. Don't know if 9 colors is plenty, maybe we can add some more.
Agreed with above. Currently tag color is the only visual guide on the items. It can still be 9 colors, but several tags should be able to share a color.
Agreed with the many others above, please remove the limit on number of coloured tags, or at least give us a tickbox in the edit tagging dialogue to do so.
My current use case involves inserting emojis to represent different topics, such as a salt shaker emoji for salinity, a ladybug for macro-invertebrates, and so on as it suits. But those emojis only show up next to list items if they have a colour assigned, and nine topics only is extremely limited for many of the sciences where there are so many topics to examine.
If it is beyond the scope of Zotero development to change this system though, do you mind posting or linking a guide to edit this in the code in our own user instances?
Would it be at least possible to change the colors? For example, I find it quite hard to distinguish between the two purple or green colors. I just tried to set one of the purple colors to black, but I found no way to do this.
Yes, please add more colors. As a researcher who works on many projects, a greater number of tags would enable me to have different tag sets for each project.
Here my vision of how tags could work:
1. More colors to choose from. Many of the color pairs don't contrast well for my vision, e.g. pink and magenta, blue and royal blue. I find myself constantly wishing for yellow and black. I'd like more to choose from so I can choose colors that contrast for me. Why not add a color picker with 50+ colors and custom colors, like the color pickers found in google sheets? This feature would increase accessibility.
2. Unlimited number of visible tags allowed (I know there was discussion on whether showing many tags is a good choice or not. I say let users decide! For some users, maybe it isn't and they won't. For others it is, so please let us :)
3. Enable hiding a tag without disassociating its color.
4. Allow more shapes besides square. For example, circle, diamond, triangle, star. This would help more tags to be distinguishable without increasing their size or showing text within a tag. It would especially help for users who can't easily distinguish all the colors if we could instead distinguish tags by shape. This feature would increase accessibility.
Based on the suggestions above, each tag would have attributes "name", "color", "shape", and "visible".
I give here a personal understanding of the situation on colored tags.
First, it is probably useful to clarify that the current concept of "colored tags" actually bundles several functionalities: 1) Assign a color to a tag, to change the color of the tag in the Tag Selector, in the Tags tab of the Item Pane, and in the annotations pane in the viewer. 2) Assign a number to a tag: 2a) To pin the tag to the top of the Tag Selector, with the position of the tag in there controlled by the assigned number 2b) To quickly add or remove a tag from selected items by typing the corresponding number key on the keyboard 3) Display the tag information of an item in front of its title in the center pane of My Library: 3a) As a small colored square [if the tag contains some text or spaces] 3b) Show the emojis [if the tag only contains contiguous emojis]
In the current situation: (A) These functionalities are not available outside of the colored tags (B) The colored tags have all of these functionalities together
People have made different requests to increase the functionalities of the colored tags. Some of them could be implemented within the current frame of the colored tags, making some adjustments to the existing features, e.g.: - Having the option to choose the colors assigned to the 9 colored tags. - The original request of this post, which was to increase the number of colored tags from 6 to 9, and has now been implemented. - Change what is displayed in the center pane from the tag.
The key limitation with colored tags in the current situation is that they are limited to a maximum of 9, due to the 9 numbers available on the keyboard. This limitation could be overcome for example with sets of colored tags.
Going beyond this, you must break (A) (-> Add a separate feature providing some of these functionalities) and decide whether you keep (B) (-> Decide how the new feature interacts with the colored tags).
To build the new emoji tags, the applicability conditions of the emoji tags (their defnition, or the "if" condition I have mentioned above) and the displayed information will probably need to be adjusted. The main limitation of emoji tags is that they do not carry any text information (the "name" attribute that you mention). This is fine for the colored tags, where you have less than 9 colored tags to remember. But this is quickly going to be messy if the feature is extended to an unlimited number of emoji tags.
One possibility would be to define as emoji tags all the tags starting with an emoji. Only the first contiguous emojis or characters should be displayed in the center pane of My Library. It could look like: ⭐ Important, with ⭐ displayed in the center pane and the full tag definition visible on the right side, from the Tags tab of the Item Pane. The ful list of emoji tags with their definitions would still be visible fairly easily from the Tag Selector, just after the colored tags. But some other variations of this may be better.
Then, there are still some adjustments to add on top of this, such as the ability to hide all emoji tags from the center pane, the abiility to hide individual tags, ... The auto-complete feature to find an existing tag would also need to be improved, so that typing Impor... would show the tag ⭐ Important automatically.
@leahperl: In my understanding, emoji tags would probably address your point 2. Your point 4 is already possible by using emojis as colored tags.
We definitely need a lot more colour options, not to mention how terrible the current 9-colour palette is, speaking as a person with an eye condition. For some people, it may be 9 colours but to me there are about 4 options to select. There are about two purples, two browns, two greens etc. This colour selection is not inclusive at all and not accessibility-friendly. I agree that the best way to address this is increasing the colour options. Sorry to sound very frustrated about this but why would anyone choose two purples and a pink almost the same as those purples while there are many high contrast colours like yellow, black etc. and why are we still talking about this limitation after almost a decade since the OP's comment...
Just adding my vote here: we surely need more colour options for the tags. Zotero proves to me everyday that it is a great research tool. The call to add more colour options for the tags would make my/our life much easier for sure. The ability to set 'permanent' tags for cross-filtering would be amazing! Some of the ideas that were proposed in this thread are very welcome as well, particularly the idea to have colour-categories (to be able to differentiate between Courses; Projects; Primary/Secondary Sources; Theoretical/Empirical Sources; Genres; Locations; Periods etc).
+1 for an RGB/hex color picker +1 for more color slots +1 for assigning multiple tags to one color +1 for 1-5 stars rating +1 for adding following properties to a tag: "name", "color", "shape", "visible"
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Is there a reason there are only 9 colors? I was highlighting in Adobe which has the possiblity for a lot more colors, but htey were getting grouped (green + light green, for example)
I tried increasing then number of colors in the code, by editing it as instructed by the site: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/more-zotfile-hacks-extract-underlines-and-change-remove-title-and-color-names/21051
I found the color section and increased the number of color steps (though not with great naming)
// define color category based on HSL
if (l < 0.12) return "Black";
if (l > 0.98) return "White";
if (s < 0.2) return "Gray";
if (h < 15) return "Red";
if (h < 30) return "RedOrange";
if (h < 45) return "Orange";
if (h < 55) return "YellowOrange";
if (h < 65) return "Yellow";
if (h < 85) return "YellowGreen";
if (h < 125) return "BrightGreen";
if (h < 155) return "MintGreen";
if (h < 170) return "Green";
if (h < 180) return "GreenCyan";
if (h < 190) return "Cyan";
if (h < 230) return "RoyalBlue";
if (h < 270) return "Blue";
if (h < 300) return "Lavender";
if (h < 335) return "Magenta";
return "Red";
I also changed the labels in the options
{"Black": " #000000", "White": " #FFFFFF", "Gray": " #808080", "Red": " #FF0000", "RedOrange": " FF5500", "Orange": " #FFA500", "YellowOrange": " #FFD500", "Yellow": " #FFFF00", "YellowGreen": " #AAFF00", "BrightGreen": " #00FF00", "MintGreen": " #00FF80", "Green": " #00FFAA", "GreenCyan": " #00FFEA", "Cyan": " #00FFFF", "RoyalBlue": " #0055FF", "Blue": " #0000FF", "Lavender": " #AA00FF", "Magenta": " #FF00FF"}
I can install zotfile & it is recognized as such, but no longer extracts highlighted annotations, even when I toggle the color options to false.
Anyway, it still works when I re-install the original file, so I can go back to only 9 colors if what I am trying is not really feasible.
Thanks for your suggestions!
@adamsmith For me, 9 colors is actually plenty. The only thing I really need is to have more than one tag of the same color. People could, for example, use orange tags for all the different classes they teach. So when they see an item with an orange dot, they know it was used for teaching and if they want to, they can click on the item to see the specific class (=tag) it belongs to.
In my case, I would use orange tags for all the items that I already cited in a text I wrote in the past and green tags for items that I have cited already in the context of a WIP. Then, when I'm done writing the current WIP, I can convert all the green tags to orange tags.
For this to be reasonable, it's necessary to remove (or make customizable) the feature that all colored tags stick to the tag selector by default. The display of the tag list could be much improved itself (even just reducing the top and bottom margins would do a lot), but that's another topic.
I use 30 something tags with a kind of a hierarchy and need to do it somehow, colours would be the best solution, not 30 plus colours, I can use same colours for various of the tags. for instance 9 are same level, 10 other level and so on. What I need is to be able to address a greater number of tags with colours already there
I haven't tried this but maybe you can create tags with 1 to 5 asterisks.
My current use case involves inserting emojis to represent different topics, such as a salt shaker emoji for salinity, a ladybug for macro-invertebrates, and so on as it suits. But those emojis only show up next to list items if they have a colour assigned, and nine topics only is extremely limited for many of the sciences where there are so many topics to examine.
If it is beyond the scope of Zotero development to change this system though, do you mind posting or linking a guide to edit this in the code in our own user instances?
For example, I find it quite hard to distinguish between the two purple or green colors. I just tried to set one of the purple colors to black, but I found no way to do this.
Here my vision of how tags could work:
1. More colors to choose from. Many of the color pairs don't contrast well for my vision, e.g. pink and magenta, blue and royal blue. I find myself constantly wishing for yellow and black. I'd like more to choose from so I can choose colors that contrast for me. Why not add a color picker with 50+ colors and custom colors, like the color pickers found in google sheets? This feature would increase accessibility.
2. Unlimited number of visible tags allowed (I know there was discussion on whether showing many tags is a good choice or not. I say let users decide! For some users, maybe it isn't and they won't. For others it is, so please let us :)
3. Enable hiding a tag without disassociating its color.
4. Allow more shapes besides square. For example, circle, diamond, triangle, star. This would help more tags to be distinguishable without increasing their size or showing text within a tag. It would especially help for users who can't easily distinguish all the colors if we could instead distinguish tags by shape. This feature would increase accessibility.
Based on the suggestions above, each tag would have attributes "name", "color", "shape", and "visible".
First, it is probably useful to clarify that the current concept of "colored tags" actually bundles several functionalities:
1) Assign a color to a tag, to change the color of the tag in the Tag Selector, in the Tags tab of the Item Pane, and in the annotations pane in the viewer.
2) Assign a number to a tag:
2a) To pin the tag to the top of the Tag Selector, with the position of the tag in there controlled by the assigned number
2b) To quickly add or remove a tag from selected items by typing the corresponding number key on the keyboard
3) Display the tag information of an item in front of its title in the center pane of My Library:
3a) As a small colored square [if the tag contains some text or spaces]
3b) Show the emojis [if the tag only contains contiguous emojis]
In the current situation:
(A) These functionalities are not available outside of the colored tags
(B) The colored tags have all of these functionalities together
People have made different requests to increase the functionalities of the colored tags. Some of them could be implemented within the current frame of the colored tags, making some adjustments to the existing features, e.g.:
- Having the option to choose the colors assigned to the 9 colored tags.
- The original request of this post, which was to increase the number of colored tags from 6 to 9, and has now been implemented.
- Change what is displayed in the center pane from the tag.
The key limitation with colored tags in the current situation is that they are limited to a maximum of 9, due to the 9 numbers available on the keyboard. This limitation could be overcome for example with sets of colored tags.
Going beyond this, you must break (A) (-> Add a separate feature providing some of these functionalities) and decide whether you keep (B) (-> Decide how the new feature interacts with the colored tags).
Zotero devs have mentioned that:
- They currently do not plan to separate 1 & 2 from the colored tags (Assign a color to a tag & Assign a number to a tag):
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/87443/why-only-9-tags-in-each-library-can-have-colors-assigned
- But they do plan to separate the emoji tags (functionality 3b) from the colored tags:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/99333/request-more-available-colored-tags-to-enable-using-emojis-beside-the-item-title-among-others
To build the new emoji tags, the applicability conditions of the emoji tags (their defnition, or the "if" condition I have mentioned above) and the displayed information will probably need to be adjusted.
The main limitation of emoji tags is that they do not carry any text information (the "name" attribute that you mention). This is fine for the colored tags, where you have less than 9 colored tags to remember. But this is quickly going to be messy if the feature is extended to an unlimited number of emoji tags.
One possibility would be to define as emoji tags all the tags starting with an emoji. Only the first contiguous emojis or characters should be displayed in the center pane of My Library. It could look like:
⭐ Important, with⭐displayed in the center pane and the full tag definition visible on the right side, from the Tags tab of the Item Pane. The ful list of emoji tags with their definitions would still be visible fairly easily from the Tag Selector, just after the colored tags.But some other variations of this may be better.
Then, there are still some adjustments to add on top of this, such as the ability to hide all emoji tags from the center pane, the abiility to hide individual tags, ...
The auto-complete feature to find an existing tag would also need to be improved, so that typing
Impor...would show the tag⭐ Importantautomatically.@leahperl: In my understanding, emoji tags would probably address your point 2.
Your point 4 is already possible by using emojis as colored tags.
Sorry to sound very frustrated about this but why would anyone choose two purples and a pink almost the same as those purples while there are many high contrast colours like yellow, black etc. and why are we still talking about this limitation after almost a decade since the OP's comment...
https://github.com/zotero/zotero/pull/3517
Zotero proves to me everyday that it is a great research tool. The call to add more colour options for the tags would make my/our life much easier for sure. The ability to set 'permanent' tags for cross-filtering would be amazing!
Some of the ideas that were proposed in this thread are very welcome as well, particularly the idea to have colour-categories (to be able to differentiate between Courses; Projects; Primary/Secondary Sources; Theoretical/Empirical Sources; Genres; Locations; Periods etc).
+1 for more color slots
+1 for assigning multiple tags to one color
+1 for 1-5 stars rating
+1 for adding following properties to a tag: "name", "color", "shape", "visible"
Cheers,
E.