Feature Suggestion: Support Taking Notes for Vertical Texts in Zotero PDF Viewer

Arslan-Luzian-Huang · December 14, 2023

Zotero is a powerful, easy-to-use tool for research, and I have used it for years with great delight. Thanks for your contribution to academic society!
One little feature suggestion: While most publications are in horizontally text direction, many East Asian publications are still in vertically text direction, especially history and literature books. But Zotero PDF viewer (at least Desktop Zotero 6 and 7 beta versions I have used) does not support taking notes for vertical texts. If one day the developer team could add the feature it would be a killer for humanity research.
Best wishes!

martynas_b · December 14, 2023

@Arslan-Luzian-Huang

Could you explain what exactly isn't supported? Maybe make same screenshots?

Also please send example PDF files to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread.

Arslan-Luzian-Huang · December 14, 2023

@martynas_b Thanks for your quick replay! Sorry for some misleading statements just now. For example, in a example file, the reading direction is from up to down, and then right to left. When I want to select the first column as annotation note, Acrobat responds to my selection correctly and highlights the selected text area as blue (Fig A). But in Zotero PDF viewer (Fig B), when I want to select the first column as note, sometimes it works, sometimes not. Regardless of whether the selected text was saved as annotation successfully or not, Zotero PDF viewer never highlight the selected text. The example PDF file and figures will be sent to your email address.

cfltz · February 14, 2024

+1. I have the same issue. I can't select accurately select Chinese characters on vertically aligned text, so I'm unable to accurately highlight, copy text, etc. For example, in this I clicked and scrolled across only the first two characters (可以）and Zotero doesn't highlight what I have selected. When I clicked to highlight the text yellow, it turns out Zotero somehow selected a huge block of text (image 1), and the highlight appears as a blue dotted line that is very unaligned (image 2).

FWIW, I OCR'ed this text with Adobe 2020. I'm not sure if a different program would produce a different result yet.

Thank you.

Image 1
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u6223352/3zrr3nvo8nv48cesu900.png

Image 2
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u6223352/ix881eu2dp3t831f8ija.png

martynas_b · February 16, 2024

@cfltz Does vertical text selection work in Acrobat Reader for those files? If so please send example PDF files to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread.

cfltz · February 16, 2024

@martynas_b It sure does. I'll send an email now. Thank you!

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u6223352/i3qtr1hl2once9eltcc7.png

martynas_b · February 19, 2024

Ok, we will try to fix that in future Zotero versions.

cfltz · February 19, 2024

@martynas_b Thank you!