Upgrade StorageStreamlining annotated notes workflow
As an on-again, off-again user of Zotero, I love the new Zotero 7! Aside from the beautiful new design, I especially love the new capabilities for seeing a reference's full citation by mousing over the author or year, and for splitting the screen horizontally or vertically to track two parts of the pdf at once. This removes so much friction from the workflow for me.
I notice that one of my biggest friction points with Zotero remains though, which is the workflow of creating and reviewing annotated notes. I'm used to Mendeley, which has a very seamless workflow for annotated notes:
- one can create a new annotated note at any location of a pdf by right clicking and selecting "add note" from the context menu
- once this is done, the text box for the new note appears right below the newly placed note icon and is immediately ready to receive keyboard input
- once created, the annotated note can easily be reviewed in the original context by clicking on the note, which pops up a window with the note contents right next to the note icon
Conversely, this is my experience with the current Zotero:
- if I'm inspired to create a new annotated note at a certain part of the pdf, first I have to move the mouse to the icon bar above the pdf and click the "add note" icon
- then I have to navigate the mouse back to the relevant part of the pdf where I want to stick the note and click there
- then I have to shift my eyes over to the lower left corner of the Zotero window where the contents of the new note are displayed in the "show annotations" sidebar
- sometimes this new note is ready to receive KB input right away, but other times I have to move the mouse over to it and click "add comment" before I can start typing
- once created, to review the annotated note I can click it, which conveniently scrolls the "show annotations" sidebar to the corresponding entry and highlights it, but once again I have to shift my eyes to the side of the screen to actually read it
Basically, there are a lot of extraneous mouse and eye movements in the Zotero workflow for annotated notes compared to the Mendeley workflow. I can really feel the drag of this on my concentration and my inspired stream of thought as it pulls me out of the flow of keeping my mouse and eyes right in the one part of the pdf where I've created the annotated note, which is also adjacent to relevant parts of the pdf contents, and immediately jotting down my thoughts. Conversely with the Mendeley workflow it's all so seamless that it feels like it enhances my engagement with the content rather than detracting from it. My mouse and eyes never have to stray from the exact location of the pdf that has caught my interest.
Also, this is obviously much less important, but I've always found the Zotero annotated note icon looks a bit blocky / clunky / ugly whereas the Mendeley icon feels less obstrusive and more aesthetically pleasing.
I'd really love if this could be addressed in the near future, amongst all the other ongoing improvements and hard work-- for me it's the last little friction point that prevents me from being completely over the moon for Zotero.
Apologies in advance if there is existing discussion of this or existing ways to modify Zotero settings to change the annotated note workflow-- I've done some good faith searching and poking around but didn't find anything about this.
I notice that one of my biggest friction points with Zotero remains though, which is the workflow of creating and reviewing annotated notes. I'm used to Mendeley, which has a very seamless workflow for annotated notes:
- one can create a new annotated note at any location of a pdf by right clicking and selecting "add note" from the context menu
- once this is done, the text box for the new note appears right below the newly placed note icon and is immediately ready to receive keyboard input
- once created, the annotated note can easily be reviewed in the original context by clicking on the note, which pops up a window with the note contents right next to the note icon
Conversely, this is my experience with the current Zotero:
- if I'm inspired to create a new annotated note at a certain part of the pdf, first I have to move the mouse to the icon bar above the pdf and click the "add note" icon
- then I have to navigate the mouse back to the relevant part of the pdf where I want to stick the note and click there
- then I have to shift my eyes over to the lower left corner of the Zotero window where the contents of the new note are displayed in the "show annotations" sidebar
- sometimes this new note is ready to receive KB input right away, but other times I have to move the mouse over to it and click "add comment" before I can start typing
- once created, to review the annotated note I can click it, which conveniently scrolls the "show annotations" sidebar to the corresponding entry and highlights it, but once again I have to shift my eyes to the side of the screen to actually read it
Basically, there are a lot of extraneous mouse and eye movements in the Zotero workflow for annotated notes compared to the Mendeley workflow. I can really feel the drag of this on my concentration and my inspired stream of thought as it pulls me out of the flow of keeping my mouse and eyes right in the one part of the pdf where I've created the annotated note, which is also adjacent to relevant parts of the pdf contents, and immediately jotting down my thoughts. Conversely with the Mendeley workflow it's all so seamless that it feels like it enhances my engagement with the content rather than detracting from it. My mouse and eyes never have to stray from the exact location of the pdf that has caught my interest.
Also, this is obviously much less important, but I've always found the Zotero annotated note icon looks a bit blocky / clunky / ugly whereas the Mendeley icon feels less obstrusive and more aesthetically pleasing.
I'd really love if this could be addressed in the near future, amongst all the other ongoing improvements and hard work-- for me it's the last little friction point that prevents me from being completely over the moon for Zotero.
Apologies in advance if there is existing discussion of this or existing ways to modify Zotero settings to change the annotated note workflow-- I've done some good faith searching and poking around but didn't find anything about this.
For what it's worth, you can press Alt/Option plus a number key to select a given annotation tool with the keyboard — currently that's Alt/Option-3 for note annotations in Zotero 7. You may or may not find that quicker than the toolbar button.
Some people have also asked for the ability to lock the note annotation toolbar button on, the same way that the highlight and annotation tools can be locked on. I believe we originally had the button do that, but we disabled it in response to feedback that it was too annoying (with the idea being that people are generally adding many fewer note annotations than highlights). But we might add that back as an option. It should always have focus. If you can reproduce that with specific steps, we'd want to know. This just sounds like a misunderstanding. Zotero's annotation tools can be used with the sidebar either open or closed. When it's open, that's where the annotation widget appears. If you want the widget to appear in a popup at the cursor location, you just have to close the sidebar.
re: annotated note focus, it's not completely obvious to me what's going on, but after playing around with it here's my current hypothesis. I'm working with an article that already has a bunch of highlight and note annotations, with the annotations sidebar active. Most of the time, a newly created annotated note has focus in the sidebar and I can type right away. But if I add a new annotated note somewhere in-between existing annotations, AND the annotations sidebar is scrolled up relative to the newly created note such that it's triggered to auto-scroll down, it almost always does a partial auto-scroll to the new note such that I can see the "Page #" header but not the text box. If I then scroll down to fully show the note, it is not in focus and I have to click "Add comment" to type in it. Even if I try typing right away when the note is partially shown like this, the text isn't entered and I have to manually click it.
Once this happens, it seems to force the behavior for all subsequently created notes for this pdf to not have focus and require clicking "add comment", even if these notes are placed in areas that previously had the correct default focus. Note creation in other pdfs seems OK until the bug is triggered in those ones independently. Once the bug is triggered it seems the only way to solve it is to close and re-open Zotero.
For instance see attached images:
1) https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u14828965/gzuzsufag0223fh2gzfr.png
2) https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u14828965/l2kg2j0kjx8l4aextna8.png
1) is what I see at the bottom of the notations sidebar when adding a note after all existing annotations within a page. It is ready to receive KB input.
2) is what I see in identical circumstances, but after triggering the bug in the way described above. Now the full note isn't displayed by the auto-scroll and won't receive KB input until "add comment" is clicked (even if I attempt to type right after creating the note)
re: the point about different behavior with the sidebar open or closed, thanks, that is helpful. However, it's still a bit inconvenient to have to close the sidebar to enable this note behavior. It also feels a bit inconvenient that e.g. if I want to have the sidebar open to display the paper outline, then when I add a note it forces the sidebar into the annotation view, which would require me to manually re-select the desired outline view each time I add an annotation. I think it would be more convenient to be able to have the note text box appear below the note icon in the pdf independently of what is happening in the sidebar, and for adding notations not to force the "show annotations" option in the sidebar if it is open and currently on a different view setting (or, to allow flexibility in this behavior in the settings).
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u7294073/hnoh1840al0qdh2fxxp6.png
**Edit:** I have found that clicking on the highlight in the text switches focus to the text field of the note the sidebar! I could certainly use that workflow, just had to discover it first.
(Old comment included below)
~~I would much enjoy annotating and typing my comments without the need to search in the sidebar. It's not just the mouse movement, but also the time it takes to find a note when there are already many others, and then the time to find my place in the text again.
I agree that switching focus to the text field of the most recently created note would be helpful, and I don't find it to be the case in Zotero 7. I don't know if that's a regression, or intended behaviour.
In the latter case, would it be possible to have a shortcut to switch the focus to the (text field of) the most recently created note? If I could suggest, it might be Tab (if that's possible via setting a focus relative to the most recent note). Because the way to finish editing the comment is also to press Tab.~~