Upgrade StorageFeature request: Add annotations for web pages
The PDF annotation features are in the beta preview are fantastic, and it would be super useful to be able to annotate HTML pages in the same interface.
When I do research, I often find useful material/articles both in the form of PDFs and HTML pages. Although these are technically very different storage formats, they are often similar content-wise (e.g. text article with images) and being able to view and annotate them in the same manner would be advantageous from a user perspective in my opinion.
While there are existing tools such as hypothesis (https://web.hypothes.is/) and memex (https://getmemex.com/) to annotate the web which also work to some extent with local files, it would be great to have a local annotated copy of both HTML page snapshots and their annotations (highlights, comments, notes) instead of relying on an online service. Having that said, I also see value (and potentially saved development time) in hooking into an existing tool, so I think either could work as long as the capabilities for annotations and creating notes are similar within the Zotero interface.
I previously suggested a conversion to PDF as a solution for annotating web pages, but my takeaway from the discussions there are that Zotero is more likely to support HTML annotations directly, so I am opening this thread to track this feature as well as collect tips on current workarounds (previous discussion https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/81185/feature-request-optionally-save-web-pages-as-pdf-and-a-list-of-tools-that-might-help).
When I do research, I often find useful material/articles both in the form of PDFs and HTML pages. Although these are technically very different storage formats, they are often similar content-wise (e.g. text article with images) and being able to view and annotate them in the same manner would be advantageous from a user perspective in my opinion.
While there are existing tools such as hypothesis (https://web.hypothes.is/) and memex (https://getmemex.com/) to annotate the web which also work to some extent with local files, it would be great to have a local annotated copy of both HTML page snapshots and their annotations (highlights, comments, notes) instead of relying on an online service. Having that said, I also see value (and potentially saved development time) in hooking into an existing tool, so I think either could work as long as the capabilities for annotations and creating notes are similar within the Zotero interface.
I previously suggested a conversion to PDF as a solution for annotating web pages, but my takeaway from the discussions there are that Zotero is more likely to support HTML annotations directly, so I am opening this thread to track this feature as well as collect tips on current workarounds (previous discussion https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/81185/feature-request-optionally-save-web-pages-as-pdf-and-a-list-of-tools-that-might-help).
- https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/76648/highlight-text-within-web-clipping-archive
- https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/68094/taking-highlights-from-wikipedia
- https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/72976/plugin-for-converting-website-snapshot-to-pdf
- https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/56209/best-tool-for-highlighting-webpages
- https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/22330/highlight-text-on-webpages-before-saving-to-zotero
my current workaround is to copy webpage text into a note file and use the rtf editor to highlight. this mostly works, albeit lacking the ability to extract annotations to a new note.
I have been wondering if zotero could scrape and clean web page text like OneNote web clipper or instapaper or some browsers' reading modes do. for OneNote it's possible to specify whether to capture the whole page or to look for an 'article' and just extract that text and not all the other navigation and garbage.
these different tools extract the article text and hyperlinks into a reading-optimized style. perhaps zotero could do something similar?
The new official PDF annotation tool is amazing. It would be nice if you guys can make one for the web page.
I have recently described a workflow for saving and annotating web pages as HTML files. Perhaps this could help, as long as a fully developed tool is not in place?
Try for example the link: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/89301/feature-request-add-annotations-for-web-pages#:~:text=Coming from Citavi where these is a very convenient feature that allows to “Save as PDF”
In Chrome, you can create a link to a fragment by selecting the fragment, right click and select 'copy link to highlight'. In Firefox, you can install the addon 'link to text fragment' to get the same functionality.
You can use this on your locally stored html pages as well, but for me opening the link only works if opened in Chrome. If I open te link to the locally stored file in Firefox, the Text fragment suffix is ignored/removed.
The 'Print Friendly to PDF' Browser extension does a decent job at capturing the text of a webpage into a pdf file with the option to remove blocks of text which is great.
Yet, especially for some blog posts, it can fail quite dramatically which makes the pdf useless and the text cannot be annotated with Zotero directly.
I have looked into various popular alternatives for annotating these cases directly on the web, but all of them induce much more complexity and manual work into my workflow.
The main reason to request this feature is that, with the new PDF annotation functionality Zotero has become not only a bibliography/reference management system but also, as any good reference management systems, an anotation management system too. It doesn't make any sense to search within notes on PDF files but not HTML files, considering that knowledge is increasingly saved/delivered in html form.
I do it very similarly to the adouwa way found at: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/247874/#Comment_247874
I just do it like this:
Right click on the snapshot > Select "Show File" > Then, right click on the html file > Select 'Open With' and you can use Word, LibreOffice, or whatever app that has a highlight tool > Make your annotations there and save the file.
Warning though, adouwa is correct in that it screws up the html layout, but the text is still there.
My biggest problem with doing it that way is that you cannot export your annotations, like you can with text pdf's, or if you can I haven't figured it out. I prefer for everything to remain in Zotero.
Journals are increasingly treating the HTML versions of their articles as first-class citizens and not an afterthought, and I think it’s really unfortunate that we’re throwing overboard all the advantages of HTML publishing when it comes to annotations.
If there is an extension out there that does this, why should Zotero have one? Well, as far as I can tell, no similar extension exists for any other browser. And the fact is, most people don't use Firefox. There are extensions for other browsers that you can use to highlight web pages, but I've not found one yet that lets you save the annotated snapshot locally in the same way that PageMark does. Most of them save the annotated page in the cloud somewhere. To compound the problem for me, I have recently migrated from Windows to Mac, and though I've been a loyal Firefox user for years, I'm growing fond of Safari due to its integration with the Apple ecosystem (especially Keychain). But to annotate my Zotero snapshots I still have to use Firefox.
Bottom line: there should be a cross-platform Zotero add-on like PageMark. I cannot make one because I am not an add-on developer. But this is clearly something a LOT of Zotero users would make use of. Please, somebody, make it happen!