[feature-request] Update extracted highlights

yhoeb
Hello,

First of all, congrats on the new pdf editor and highlighter and how you integrated notes.

I was wondering whether it would be possible to add a feature to "update" a note. Because for now, when I make new highlights of a note, I need to delete the old extracted notes highlights and rename the new one to just "Annotations". This is needed for my workflow (I just need one "Annotations" note and do all my editing in obsidian). The title is not of concern here though, I would just like to update the content of the note so that it reflects the current highlights I made (whether new ones, old ones, or the absence removed highlights)

Would this be possible?
  • dstillman
    This has been requested before, but the obvious problem is that you might have made edits to the note since you first created it. I understand that you personally won't have, given your workflow, but that's not something that Zotero can rely on, and "updating" an existing note where annotations might have been edited, deleted, duplicated, or moved around is far from straightforward.

    I suppose we could consider an option to just overwrite an entire existing note with new annotations from the PDF it was originally created from, but it's a bit of a risky operation to allow, and it wouldn't save much time over just right-clicking on the parent item in the items list, choosing Add Note from Annotations, and deleting the old note.
  • dstillman
    it's a bit of a risky operation to allow
    (An exception would be if we set a flag when the note is created and only allow this option if the note hasn't been edited at all. In your case it sounds like you're changing the title, but that's something that will likely be customizable soon via a template.)
  • yhoeb
    Thank you for taking into consideration this request.

    > An exception would be if we set a flag when the note is created and only allow this option if the note hasn't been edited at all. In your case it sounds like you're changing the title, but that's something that will likely be customizable soon via a template.

    That sounds like a great workaround for me! And indeed, I don't want the date in my annotations so I just remove it manually each time.
  • yhoeb
    If this could be tied to a shortcut, that would even be better :) !

    My workflow would then be:
    - highlight/take notes in zotero
    - use shortcut to export annotations into a note (with a fixed title)
    - go into obsidian, create/update not using the bibnotes plugin: https://github.com/stefanopagliari/bibnotes . Summarise and reformat the already made highlights and annotations
    Then immediately after, or at any time,
    - continue highlighting/taking notes in zotero
    - use shortcut..
    - update note in obsidian...
    etc.

    The nice thing about bibnotes is that it only adds new annotations to a note and leaves the existing annotations intact (especially if they have been tinkered with to fix a typo, add notes, summarise, etc). It's a really smooth way to process highlights even though one hasn't finished reading a document (e.g. longer articles or books).
  • ryanwwest
    I'm interested in this same workflow. Although I'd be even more interested if there were a setting to just automatically have the annotations be exported into a note, and automatically updated when I add additional annotations.

    I also really like the idea if leaving existing annotations intact in the case of tinkering, since PDF text often gets mangled. Alternatively, it would be nice to potentially delete annotations from a PDF and have the corresponding exported annotations be deleted as well, but that may be more difficult to implement.
  • davemurrayrust
    Me too!

    It would also be nice if it was possible to have a synced annotations file, that always had the current set of annotations from the PDF in.
  • necessaryillusions
    This is an extremely needed feature, since it severely impairs mine and at least with the people I work with in my group.
    If this proves to be too difficult to implement (i.e. checking if the file has been modified or not), an alternative solution could be adding a button to extract annotations for all selected PDFs.
    Currently, the only way to do this is to right-click each PDF individually.
  • dstillman
    @necessaryillusions: Just saying something is "extremely needed" isn't particularly useful — you should say what you're actually trying to accomplish, since any solution would depend on your actual use case.

    We still may implement something along the lines of what we say above — the ability to easily keep a note updated with annotations from the PDF — but just to reiterate, if you're using an external tool that integrates with Zotero (e.g., an Obsidian plugin), that tool can pull annotations directly and not use notes at all.
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