Upgrade StorageZotero 6 Note Editor HTML View
The new Note Editor has some nice features--the citation tool in particular. However, is there no way to view and edit the raw HTML of the note? In the past, this was helpful in certain cases.
As a side note, I miss the less bare-bones toolbar of TinyMCE. I use the styles quite a bit (e.g. Heading 1), and though still functional, the new interface makes them less visible.
As a side note, I miss the less bare-bones toolbar of TinyMCE. I use the styles quite a bit (e.g. Heading 1), and though still functional, the new interface makes them less visible.
What did you use that for previously?
I just tested out copying from Excel into the new editor to see what it would do, and I don't really understand it. It copied the cells as elements with text, but the text is not editable. The individual cells are selectable, and there are handles around the entire table, but they do not seem to be draggable. So....what is it? With HTML, I could take a look at see whether it's a table or a set of DIVs or something else. With the new editor, since it doesn't use HTML as you say, then I'm surprised that it even attempts to copy the table from Excel at all.
The same oddity happens when copying the table from https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_tables.asp as rendered by Vivaldi into the new Zotero editor. It clearly renders it like a table, with text and individual cells, but the text is not editable and the table is not resizable.
Another use case: let's say I copy something from a web page and paste into the editor and it adds some unwanted formatting. Yes, I can use the new editor's "Clear formatting" button, but that would in theory clear all the formatting. What if I want to keep most of the formatting, but there's one aspect I didn't want, which could be changed easily in HTML mode. Some pages, for example, can have weird oddities where a small portion of the text happens to be in a different font. Moreover, if the copied selection is large, I could copy the HTML into my text editor (EditPad Pro) and search-and-replace to fix the formatting issue thoroughly.
In short, I did use it for a lot of things. It's not strictly necessary, and many users will never use it, but I did appreciate it and find it quite useful.
I suppose that if the new editor isn't based on HTML then there's no chance of adding such functionality back in. But it's unfortunate because this removes a certain flexibility and intercompatibility that comes with HTML. Moreover, I'm surprised if it doesn't use HTML at all, since the annotation templates (which control exporting PDF annotations into notes, right?) take HTML. I wonder if it might be possible to simply allow the user to reactivate TinyMCE via preferences, since the two editors are probably interchangeable in the code?
Thanks again.
I have been using a lot of tables inside individual notes, thanks to the html editor.
It was a really convenient way to display complex datas.
Yesterday, without any notification, Zotero 5 was removed and replaced by Zotero 6 !!
For me, it is a catastroph !
Zotero 5 was totaly removed from my hard disk. It is not correct !
I tried to reinstall Zotero 5, but the database was changed and locked for Zotero 6.
Without any html editor, I cannot work anymore. I am now loosing my time finding a Zotero alternative and exporting all my datas into another software.
I am really desappointed.
B. Merlier (France)
Zotero 6 was in beta for over a year, and very few beta testers mentioned tables during that time. We'll consider supporting them in the new editor if there's enough demand.
Other work I do involves chemical data. I am afraid to open those databases with Zotero 6.0.
On the upside, the new notes look really nice.
(I notice that html tags still work in these comments.)
I wasted my time re-installing Zotero 5 (as well as testing other new software).
Below is a philosophical reflection (not only for the Zotero team).
We are still able to perform J.S. Bach music because music notation and instruments have not changed whithin 3 centuries. In computer science, every 6 months, software are upgraded, functionnalities and encoding very often change too. How can we work in such conditions? How can our human society survive in such a moving context ?
Bertrand
As I enter the transcription in tables I change the style and width of this tables in HTML.
In this case the new version 6 is useless for me which is very sad.
As soon as there is an option to add Pictures and tables and have them in the report as well, I'll give Zotero 6 another try.
I used far more than 3 different headline styles that are now available, and also integrated tables and more fine-grained list styles.
Alternatively, what if Zotero could have an option for simply passing the notes in HTML format to an external program? Then we could use the editor of our choice.
The new editor is the foundation for many more Zotero-specific features to come. The catch is that, since we're no longer using a stock HTML editor, we don't get HTML features by default and have to implement them specifically. As I said above, very few people mentioned tables during the year-long beta, so that's not something we focused on, but since there's clearly demand, we'll work on support for tables in a future version.
@birdy113: Earlier versions of Zotero didn't support images in notes — the fact that they worked at all was a fluke, and they broke syncing and ruined performance. In Zotero 6 we've added official support for images in notes. Currently, you drag them in from the filesystem or paste from some web browsers. We'll add more ways to insert them in the future.
@gideonnoss: You can use other heading levels using Markdown.
Font color options will be returning soon.
@dstillman You could use the excuse that not many feedbacks about table were provided. But you cannot eliminate the possibility that most heavy users may have no interest in your years-long beta development at all, like me.
Just my two cents, I don't need a fancy pdf reader like that in Mendeley, so the deep coupling of the new note editor under the hook cannot be justified by the introducing of that reader.
Personally, I would like to see a more conservative and reliable development path of Zotero.
An integrated PDF reader, by contrast, was by far the most frequent reason people gave for not using Zotero, and there's been an overwhelmingly positive response to the new features in Zotero 6. If it's not for you, it's not for you, but your experience of using Zotero is not universal.
Anyway, let's not waste more time on this. We've heard the feedback that some people valued the ability to edit tables in the old editor, and we'll work to restore that functionality — likely in a much more user-friendly way — as soon as possible.
I'm not saying it's bad to have an embedded pdf annotator. As you said, I also realized it's not for me, at least not for now.
As for the feedback, I just want to remind you that user feedback is of course very important, but a great product needs to have its own soul other than just to meet the users' desire. That's the main reason I dislike and gave firefox in past years. If you insist "your experience of using Zotero is not universal", okay, fine, just take my feedback and ignore it.
For instance, if I want to copy the birth place "Bärweiler" from the following table, I must copy the entire table to another text editor (e.g., Notepad)
Name: Philipp Karl Germann
Event Type: Geburt (Birth)
Birth Date: 22. Mrz 1794 (22 Mar 1794)
Birth Place: Bärweiler, Rheinland (Rhineland-Palatinate), Preußen
Father: Jakob Germann
Mother: Maria Elisabetha Germann
Author: Evangelische Kirche Bärweiler (Kr. Meisenheim)
and then click on "Bärweiler" and hit Ctrl C.
Extremely inconvenient.
I just found this discussion, and I want to echo what so many other people have said about the loss of the ability to edit raw HTML in notes. I use this feature all the time for all sorts of editing issues. I like for my Zotero reports to have a consistent look, and I like to be able to apply my own styles.
The biggest limitation of the prior HTML code editor was no way to
I got around this limitation by editing the HTML in Sublime Text, and then adding inline styles to every element. That approach could be painful, but, it worked. Now, not having any ability to edit raw HTML really dampens my enthusiasm for Zotero as a research tool.
Even without being able to edit raw HTML in notes, I will still continue to use Zotero for managing my citations. However, without the ability to perform raw HTML edits for notes, the note taking ability of Zotero is now vastly inferior to Evernote and Microsoft OneNote.
Fortunately, both of those software packages have the ability for their users to rapidly create external URLs to notes. I think my best approach will be to create and maintain my notes in one of those packages, create external URLs, and then paste these URLs into Zotero notes.
I really wish you hadn't taken away that functionality.
If there's specific formatting you're finding yourself wanting to apply in the new note editor, start a new thread and provide more details.
In the process of summarizing how I used Zotero's note-taking features, I explored the new features available in v6.0.4. I'm still learning the features, but, my first impressions are very positive.
In previous versions of Zotero, perhaps I was leaning so heavily on the ability to edit raw HTML because these versions were lacking some of the newly added functionality.
I created a new post to talk about some of the most critical features of the raw HTML that were useful to me. Please see Features that were enabled via being able to edit raw HTML in previous versions of Zotero.
Even doing the extra step of pasting text into a 3rd space (like Apple Notes) and then copying and pasting into Zotero Notes does not resolve this issue (paragraph/line breaks still come through to Zotero Notes).
The new notes may be unusable for me with the way I used it to take and store notes from articles.
It's not totally clear what you're trying to do, but if you're referring to blocks of text with many line breaks — e.g., when copying from a fixed-width email — there are lots of third-party utilities for fixing that. That's not really related to the note editor at all (beyond, perhaps, a feature request to be able to search for special elements like paragraph breaks in the Find/Replace bar).
It seems to me the more 'conservative' users amongst us never got to hear about the new changes precisely because we were entirely happy with the original product. How does one get a notification for feedback on upcoming changes?
Thanks a lot!
There are multiple issues with editing tables, importing data from LO into a Zotero table or formatting the Zotero-table:
1. There is no means of controlling the table width, e.g. like it's done in either LO or Microsoft Office.
2. There is no means of formatting either the internal or external border lines to Zotero tables.
3. There is no means of simultaneously deleting multiple rows in a Zotero table.
4. Copying a table from LO to Zotero inserts multiple, empty rows between the rows which contain data.
5. Copying cells - not rows - into a Zotero table and from either another Zotero table or one in LO refuses to place the data on the left-hand edge AND also inserts unwanted columns on the right-hand edge.
The only way to -kind of- copy a table into Zotero seems to be from a pdf file.
It seems like you guys may have your work cut out for you on the "table" function, and I wish you lots of luck. I hope that you agree that there is no real point in a "case number" for these issues.
:-)