You can't edit embedded attachment notes (the notes that appeared in the right-hand pane after clicking on an attachment) in Zotero 7 — you have to convert them to sibling child notes (for child attachments) or standalone notes (for standalone attachments). What do you mean when you say you attempted that?

Yes, that's what I'm referring to. Embedded attachment notes are no longer supported as editable notes. The toolbar probably shouldn't be there, but that's just the note editor's read-only mode. As I say, you have to migrate the notes if you want to edit them.

The problem here is that you're not really using Zotero the way it's meant to be used. You only have standalone attachments, so your only option is to convert these notes to standalone notes, in which case they won't be linked to the attachments. You generally should be creating parent items for attachments. See Standalone Attachments and Parent Items for more on this.

I'm a bit curious about your Zotero usage, though. It seems like you're using Zotero essentially as a PDF manager, with no need for metadata (title, author, etc.), citations, multiple child notes, HTML snapshots, or any of the other features of regular Zotero items. Is that correct?

Well, I'm explaining that the way to use Zotero is to create parent items (or, in most cases, let it create parent items automatically), not to just keep a library full of PDFs with no metadata. Then you would just convert these to regular child notes of the parent item, and you can create as many child notes under an item as you want. These attachment notes were always an esoteric, little-used feature.

Given how Zotero works, you actually have to go out of your way to avoid ever creating parent items (never saving from article pages, disabling metadata retrieval, etc.). Not sure why you took this approach?

https://www.zotero.org/support/adding_items_to_zotero

What? You're wildly misinterpreting me here. Obviously Zotero is a program designed to help you digitally retain and sift through thousands of sources — that's what it does. I'm just explaining the reason we're no longer supporting these attachment notes, and pointing out that you would have to be doing a lot more work to get the result you're getting rather than just using Zotero as it's designed.

It's not even clear to me that you understand what I'm saying about the attachment notes vs. child notes and what the normal approach here would be. We can expand on that, but it's not clear that you're interested in a genuine conversation here.

Are you under the impression that people who use Zotero the way it's designed to be used don't read PDFs? You know that's one of the main points of Zotero, right? You open PDFs by double-clicking on the parent item.

I've explained multiple times how to continue using notes — the normal way that most people who use Zotero use notes, by creating child notes on regular items they've saved, usually by clicking the save button in their browser. I'm still not sure you actually understand the normal Zotero workflow and why what you're doing is a lot more effort, but given your attitude here, I'm not going to spend more time on this.

I mean you're using Zotero in a way that is not very efficient and not the way it's intended to be used. Of course that's your right - but apparently it also doesn't do what you need it to do. To achieve that you'd have to follow dstillmans advice, which he patiently tried to explain - right click on your PDF, create a parent item, then you can convert your note or create a new note for the parent item and keep using the notes more or less like you're doing now.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u5025031/tkzhhtzgk1jjuabf3gyv.png

I mean it would look something like this - maybe I'm fundamentally misunderstanding the way you work, but this seems to reproduce exactly the functionality you described.

As I understand the discussion:
- For each entry in your library, you want to have one PDF file and one note.
- As you navigate between the entries in your library, you want to be able to see and edit the note associated to each item directly in the right-hand pane, without additional clicks.
- In Zotero 6, you were using standalone attachments and embedded attachment notes to achieve that. This was not possible after creating a parent item, as the item pane of the parent item does not show you the content of the notes.
- This is not possible anymore in Zotero 7, because embedded attachment notes have been discontinued.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to achieve what you want in Zotero 7 yet (and I don't know any other program doing that).
Considering your feedback, I agree that it would be a useful feature to be able to see and edit "primary" notes directly in the Item Pane while switching items in the Items Tree. That would probably be done in the Item Pane of a parent item, with a PDF attachment and a Note attachment, as it provides many important features of Zotero. Either in the Notes section, or in the lower part of the pane.

Some pages I found useful:
https://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_support
https://www.zotero.org/support/forum_guidelines

Thank you. Even though there doesn't seem to be a solution yet, thank you for taking the time to understand the issue at hand. I greatly appreciate it.

I think this is what dstillman means:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u6099279/2pmtz63s8365twsm1wk4.png

Zotero 7 can show multiple child notes under a regular item, which is more friendly to users like me. You may need an extra click to edit the child note compared to the old attachment note, but that does not affect the workflow you described as `tab through all my sources by clicking on the arrow key`.

I hope that helps.