Upgrade Storage[feature request] Group annotations
I know that Annotations such as Highlights can have tags, which have a global scope in the whole library, and that's great.
But I would also like to be able to divide them in "groups", in the scope of a single document, so that I may organize my highlights by their intended purpose, somewhat similar to Collections in the Library itself.
For example, if I am highlighting text in a document for classification purposes, I'd like to group the Annotations in "Objectives", "Methodology", "Results", and so on. And these groups could have little arrows like Collections to show/hide items inside. This way it would be easier to find personal Annotations in a long document with numerous highlights.
At the same time, this could be used to have groups such as: "General Comments", "Section 1 Comments", "Section 2 Comments", and so on. This way they can be split into sections in a Note for easier exporting, when I "Add Note from Annotations". In a more advanced version of this feature, "Add Note from Annotations" could ask if I want to export all Annotations, or only those in specific groups.
I looked for a plugin capable of doing anything like that but couldn't find any. However, to me, this seems to have enough use cases to perhaps be considered as a built-in feature; perhaps even addressing some reasons for the requests to "merge annotations" (https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/89572/feature-suggestion-merge-annotations).
But I would also like to be able to divide them in "groups", in the scope of a single document, so that I may organize my highlights by their intended purpose, somewhat similar to Collections in the Library itself.
For example, if I am highlighting text in a document for classification purposes, I'd like to group the Annotations in "Objectives", "Methodology", "Results", and so on. And these groups could have little arrows like Collections to show/hide items inside. This way it would be easier to find personal Annotations in a long document with numerous highlights.
At the same time, this could be used to have groups such as: "General Comments", "Section 1 Comments", "Section 2 Comments", and so on. This way they can be split into sections in a Note for easier exporting, when I "Add Note from Annotations". In a more advanced version of this feature, "Add Note from Annotations" could ask if I want to export all Annotations, or only those in specific groups.
I looked for a plugin capable of doing anything like that but couldn't find any. However, to me, this seems to have enough use cases to perhaps be considered as a built-in feature; perhaps even addressing some reasons for the requests to "merge annotations" (https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/89572/feature-suggestion-merge-annotations).
Extracting annotations within the table of contents has been requested before and agreed by developers:
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/89682/how-to-extract-annotations-along-with-the-table-of-contents
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/114404/feature-request-table-of-contents-for-extracted-annotations
An option to display the outline in the same pane as the annotations for filtering would also be nice for long papers or books.
I agree that annotation tags can address some of my needs, and I am trying to fit my workflow to them. But:
- adding the table of contents to the Annotations would be extremely helpful indeed.
- when the ToC is missing, being able to export the annotations ordered/arranged by tag would be extremely helpful; filtered annotations would also be nice, but do not substitute the ordering option, since that would just mean the process needs to be repeated for each tag, when all tags are wanted.
- currently, tag-filtering just hides all other annotations; an optional system to order/group annotations by tag in the sidebar while reading the PDF would be more general than adding the table of contents to the sidebar.