Notes : My zotero text editor is limited compared to others

Aloysedelafaye
Hello there,

I'm getting used to zotero with tutorials online and am making good progresses to integrate it as my main research tool.

However, I'm a little intrigued by my text editor in my notes which looks different and has far fewer options than people who submit tutorials online seem to have.

I would especially love to be able to have titles with a nice line underneath. It totally makes me dream. Do you know what this is due to? Do I have to download an extension to also have access to the dream world of beautiful text editors? Or does it come from elsewhere?

Thank you very much in advance!
  • dstillman
    You're likely looking at old tutorials with the old version of the note editor, which had many more buttons. You can see the new note editor in the screenshot in the Zotero 6 announcement:

    https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-6/

    The new note editor is more powerful in many ways (some explained in that post), but various formatting options have moved. Underline is just in the Aa menu, or by using the standard keyboard shortcut (Ctrl/Cmd-U).
  • Aloysedelafaye
    Thank you for taking the time to answer and sending me the zotero 6 announcement. Now i understand better.

    Regarding titles, I didn't meant underline but was referencing to this kind of heading who was possible in the older version ("Heading 2" style with a line underneath to separate it from the text underneath). Here is a link to a screenshot:
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EYYxBcRzfY-7V7GeHx1WM5tt26dxXHYn/view?usp=share_link

    Is it still possible to do this kind of heading in the notes ? Also, when formating the text, how can I center text, squeeze it left or right, or indent paragraphs ?

    Thanks again for your precious help !
  • dstillman
    Oh, well that's just styling, so isn't not really right to think of that as a feature. It's just a second-level header.

    If you know some CSS, you can customize note styling using the note.css hidden pref. E.g., to underline Heading 2, you'd use this:

    h2 { text-decoration: underline }

    And then restart Zotero.

    But that's an advanced feature, and we can't really help with that.
  • Aloysedelafaye
    Thank you. Styling is key for me. I don't know CSS but will look into it and do as you suggest.

    Does the version 6 offer the possibility to center text in the notes, squeeze it left or right, or indent paragraphs ?
  • Aloysedelafaye
    I found the answers to these last questions. Thanks again.
  • xalario
    For the inferior border line that is not an underline I use

    h1 { border-bottom-style: solid; }

    or

    h2 { border-bottom-style: solid; }

    I should note that some CSS parameters do not affect the display, for example including font-size in the brackets above does not change the title size (Zotero 6.0.23 on MacOS 12.6.5)
  • claude70
    The ability to style note elements using note.css is a lot more limited that it used to be in the old html editor. As xalario mentions, you can use borders, and you can add padding-bottom to put a bit of space between the text and the border (but padding-left doesn't seem to indent anything). But not much other CSS seems to work. Colors are strange - if you add a color to a heading in note.css the heading in the format menu will take the color, but not the heading in the actual note.

    I'm assuming that ProseMirror (the engine behind the new note editor) makes it much harder to allow for custom formatting in notes - all of the new breed of "block" editors (not just those based on ProseMirror) seem to have ditched rich text formatting beyond the bare basics of italics, bold, underline, text color and highlights.

    Personally I'm still desperately hoping that some more formatting options are in the pipeline (perhaps in the upcoming v7). The devs have recently added the ability to change text color, and have expanded the color palette for text and highlights slightly (although it's still very constrained, with some odd choices - the text colors, for example, are only slightly more saturated than the highlight colors).

    For me a customizable color palette and the ability to set custom fonts (at least at the block level, if not inline) are still very high on my wishlist.
  • Aloysedelafaye
    Thanks to you both. I decided not to look into css yet. So many things to deal with already. +1 for the wishlist.
  • dstillman
    edited April 14, 2023
    The ability to style note elements using note.css is a lot more limited that it used to be in the old html editor.
    No, that's incorrect. The fact that the editor itself is block-based is irrelevant. The output is still just HTML, and you can style it however you want. You might need to use !important to override a built-in style with higher specificity.

    h2 { font-size: 20px !important; color: red !important; } works perfectly fine.
  • claude70
    edited April 16, 2023
    Thanks dstillman, much appreciated. (Don't know why I didn't think of that :-/ )

    I've managed to get set the formatting for headings, paragraphs, monospaced, lists, and blockquotes from the Note.css. This includes changing colors, background-colors, line-spacing, margins, padding, and font-family for specific elements. Setting a background-color for the body also works.

    (If anyone wants more info, you could check out the thread "Make note editor beautiful" :
    https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/86855/make-note-editor-beautiful
    or I'm happy to share my code.)

    We are, however, limited to formatting the default elements included in notes - there is no option for custom elements (which were possible in the old note editor, but did require editing the HTML code of your note, which isn't for everyone!).

    Is it possible to include a user customizable element in the new editor, that can be formatted via Note.css?

    Also, is it possible to customize the highlight and text colors through Note.css?

    Thanks!
  • uskangfu
    I had the same problem of heading's color as Claude said:

    "Colors are strange - if you add a color to a heading in note.css the heading in the format menu will take the color, but not the heading in the actual note."

    Though he said he solve the problem, I didn't see the solution in his code:https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/86855/make-note-editor-beautiful

    And the "!important" recommended by dstillman doesn't help either.

    This problem is also reported by Aionia https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/102131/can-not-change-text-color-in-notes-by-editing-extensions-zotero-note

    I hope someone can help with the specific code, thanks a lot!
  • claude70
    If anyone's still having problems changing the formatting of text colors using the Config Editor, the code that dstillman suggested does work (at least for me, in v6 and v7 beta).

    If you add the following to the note.css dialog, you should get navy blue colored headings:

    h1,h2,h3 {color: navy !important;}

    If you leave out the !important bit the Format menu will show navy headings, but they won't appear in the note.

    The code mentioned in Aionia’s post won't work, because you need to specify the color for the text elements (headings and paragraphs) separately from the body.
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