Standalone handwriting notes feature (tablet)

bananaphone
When I read an academic journal article, I also like to take handwritten notes on a tablet about the article content. These handwritten notes are helpful when I want to go back to look at an article several months later, and remember what the important parts are.

Zotero offers the ability to take _text_ notes and to associate the notes with a specific journal article. However, I do not think that it is possible to make handwriting/drawing notes with the Apple pencil in the current Zotero notes feature. Often I am drawing diagrams or graphs that aren’t a good fit for text, and I like using handwriting and not have it convert to text. Right now I have a separate database of handwritten notes in OneNote for each publication, but I would like to be able to keep these notes in Zotero so that the article and the notes about the article are connected and in the same application.

Maybe the handwriting notes would create large file sizes that would quickly add up and count against the storage quota? Or maybe there is some way to connect Zotero files to some other application.
  • dstillman
    I guess you're asking for the ability to draw in Zotero notes, but you're aware that the PDF reader supports ink annotations?
  • bananaphone
    That is correct. I am aware that PDF reader supports ink annotations. However, the journal articles that I read leave little room in the margins to take any meaningful notes. I'm imagining a digital version of a piece of paper that I would take notes on when reading a journal article, or a textbook, that is connected to the article/textbook.
  • lmuehlen
    I agree that this would be a super useful feature!
  • VitalyR
    edited March 13, 2025
    I'm also expecting the feature to make an annotation somewhere in the paper/textbook and draw in the annotation; thus, the space to draw is unlimited. And OCR functionality could also be implemented for easier discovery.

    @dstillman Could you give me some suggestions about the roadmap to implement this? I can help to implement it but I don't have much familiarity with the zotero codebase.
  • jergong
    Any updates on this? Thanks!
  • k76531
    Add a couple blank pages to the article PDF in an external PDF reader and then import the PDF back into Zotero.
  • dstillman
    @k76531: Just note that you have to either do that before adding any other annotations within Zotero or add the blank pages to the end of the document. Otherwise any existing annotations will be on the wrong page.
  • scarignano
    +1 on this, it's the only thing currently preventing me from using Zotero as main tool for literature review (atm I just export manually the papers I'm interested in into another editor like goodnotes, but being able to just make clickable notes on the text which open pages that can be hand-written on would be waaay better)

    For what it's worth, chatgpt suggests one could "easily" implement it by
    1)writing a Zotero plugin that adds a new note-block type
    which stores ink strokes in JSON
    2)Adding a small patch to the iOS app to render these blocks (when rendering notes, detect the drawing block and show a canvas)

    not sure how realistic this is, I'd try but I'm a bit unsure about how the development/testing of the modified ios version would work since I don't have an apple developer account or anything like that

    thanks as always for the great work on the app!
Sign In or Register to comment.