How to export notes?

OldSlippers
edited July 3, 2021
Probably a stupid question but please indulge me. With the zotfile plugin I can see I can export my notes and have a choice of many formats. None of them mean anything to me and the Evernote one does not work (it only seem to export the title?). Which format do I choose to get my notes into Evernote/Notion/Pages/Word/notepad ? So far I’ve just been copying and pasting.

Thanks.
  • emilianoeheyns
    The better bibtex plugin has a Collected Notes exporter that exports only notes, but the plugin is relatively heavyweight if that's all you need.
  • OldSlippers
    Thanks - I suppose that means it’s not possible just within Zotero - not without another plugin etc. Thank you.
  • dstillman
    With the new note editor in the Zotero beta, you can insert notes with active Zotero citations into Word using the new Add Note button in the Zotero Word plugin.

    For other exports, you currently need to copy and paste.

    Can you say more about the kind of workflow you have in mind?
  • OldSlippers
    edited July 6, 2021
    Thanks! I have access to Word via my university account and it won't allow me to install Zotero, unfortunately. I am not a keen Word user anyway.

    Thanks for confirming it's copy-and-paste! I don't mind, it's just good to know I am not missing any obvious tricks.

    My work flow is now as such: I read articles/books (often on ipad), highlight stuff, then put the highlights into a note so I have a summary with page references (extract via zotfile -often need to amend page numbers tho'-, or use your note editor, before Zotero I just copied and pasted highlights into a note). I often highlight the summary here and there as well. I usually use Notion (or Evernote) for this. When writing essays and articles I often have lots of 'summary notes' open on a big monitor, while writing on a laptop - the digital equivalent of having lots of books/articles spread around you while writing.

    I quite like your beta-note-editor except I cannot have lots of notes open at the same time in different windows, so still need to copy and paste it into Evernote/Notion.

    Thanks!
  • dstillman
    I quite like your beta-note-editor except I cannot have lots of notes open at the same time in different windows
    You can — that's always been possible and still is in the beta. Double-click on a note in the items list or use the "Open in a Separate Window" option from the three-dots menu in the top-right corner of the note editor.
  • OldSlippers
    oh yeah, forgot about that! Good stuff. I’d probably still put it Notion as well though - but future workflows will prove whether it would have been sufficient to keep it in Zotero. Thanks! :)
  • librarian3
    Hi Dan, I am researching bulk export of selected notes, and I was wondering if the new note editor will make this possible, or just individual notes. Otherwise I might have to suggest the better bibtex plugin recommended above.
  • dstillman
    @librarian3: The new Markdown export functionality can export multiple notes at once, but only to a single file with a horizontal rule ("---") between the notes. If you're looking for separate files, that's not currently possible, but we could consider supporting that in a future version.
  • sdflewrit783
    I think exporting into individual files would be very useful, especially for introperation with markdown-based knowledge-management tools.
  • markhampton
    I'd like to second the idea of exporting notes to individual files for knowledge management tools. I'm guessing many users have/had a flow with zotfile that assumed individual notes in MD. A related question, is there a way to have the exported note filename be more meaningful?
  • thistlillo
    This is the use case:
    I have plenty of annotations (highlighted text). For each annotation, I added a note for my co-workers.

    I have plugins installed, like Zotfile and BetterBibTeX.

    In the library, iIf I ight-click on the pdf and select "Create note from annotations", I get a file with the content of the annotations. However, the page number is missing.

    I do not not know if I used the built-in Zotero features or the Zotfile functionality. From this discussions:
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/94407/how-to-customize-pdf-annotation-note-formatting

    It seems that ZotFile allows some "formatting". However, I cannot understand how to use the Zotfile version.

    Question:
    is it possible to export the notes with their page number (if present)?
    Where can I read some documentation?

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