Drag 'standalone note' into document

flatlanderdox
This is an amazing program.

I love the feature that allows you to drag a bibliographic item into a document, and it automatically formats it into a bibliographic style, and pastes it into your document.

I was just thinking that it would be incredible if you could do the same sort of thing with a standalone note. I'm particularly thinking about OneNote usage. You could make a headline for a point, and then just drag the note from Zotero inderneath the heading for that point. Then you could collapse the zotero note when you double click on the OneNote heading.

It almost does this right now. However, it ends up with a bunch of code inserted (e.g.):

<p>Imaginative integration of focal images</p>
<p> </p>

<p>Hays, Richard B. The
  • cantabrian
    I just checked trac, and it's not clear to me what stage in development this issue is at. Any chance we can get an update?

    As a long-time Zotero user, this has been and continues to be my biggest annoyance.

    (It's Ticket #1397, btw)

    Many thanks.
  • dstillman
    Here's what I wrote on another thread:
    We're working on fixing this, but it's not as straightforward as it seems. We can copy both text and HTML to the clipboard simultaneously, but converting an HTML note to text risks losing indications of important semantic markup such as blockquotes, Word can't handle HTML blockquotes and various other semantic markup, and OpenOffice chooses to display to the user the conditional HTML comments we could use to fix some of the Word problems. But we're working on it.
    And this leaves out the question of how other apps deal with clipboard HTML, though it's possible OneNote (if it supports HTML at all—I've never used it) handles it the same as Word. Or, just as likely, it might not.

    We should have some sort of solution soon, though.
  • cantabrian
    Great. Thanks for getting back to me so soon.

    I should note that as far as I'm concerned, all that's necessary at this stage is plain text export. All I want to be able to do is to export, for example, the 80 notes that I have associated with a book as plaintext, for the purpose of putting them into something like Devonthink or Scrivener. I know that I can generate a report of my notes and copy and past the lot of them, but it's important to me that the 80 notes be separate.

    Looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with. Thanks again.
  • dstillman
    Fixed in the latest dev build.
  • fbennett
    *Very* nice! One comment, whether a bug report or a query, I'm not sure.

    Drag and drop into gedit (plain text editor) produces what looks like markdown, with block indenting preserved (!). Drag and drop directly into Open Office 3.0.1 yields the literal HTML markup. The markup looks to be all correct, but the tags all appear as text in the document. Is there an operation I'm missing?
  • ajlyon
    Drag and drop directly into Open Office 3.0.1 yields the literal HTML markup. The markup looks to be all correct, but the tags all appear as text in the document. Is there an operation I'm missing?
    This works for me (no tags are visible, formatting is correct), using the trunk XPI and OpenOffice 3.1.1 for Windows (XP). Perhaps this is a platform-specific drag-and-drop bug?

    And Dan, thanks! This is a very nice touch for integration.
  • dstillman
    Frank: What OS? Do you have Copy as HTML selected in the Export pane of the Zotero prefs (though this should only affect plaintext copying, not rich-text copying, which is what should be used for OO).
  • fbennett
    edited December 25, 2009
    OS is Linux, brand is Ubuntu Jaunty, with Gnome as the window manager.

    This could be a bug specific to my system, it's an Atom netbook, and the OS install has had some wear and tear over the past year of use. If OO 3.0.1 works under Linux on other systems, I can certainly live with it -- I'm no fan of word processors for note taking anyway.

    (Export as HTML was unchecked. After ticking it, drag and drop into the plain text editor gives the marked-up HTML, which must be what's intended. No change with the OO behavior.)
  • dstillman
    OK, I'm getting HTML in OO 3.1 on Linux as well. That's not good.
  • dstillman
    Not sure there's anything that can be done about that—if you select some text on a web page in Firefox on Linux and copy to OO, you get HTML code as well. (On OS X you get rich text.) Haven't tried KDE.
  • fbennett
    edited December 25, 2009
    Thanks for checking it out, Dan. Looks like one more in a long and cherished list of Linux OO bugs. My previous favorite was the way Impress becomes glacially slow when a single Japanese character is entered into a slide presentation. Plain text it is. :)
  • dstillman
    (Won't affect Frank's issue, but I missed a file in the previous commit with some hidden prefs that affect the default behavior with regard to blockquotes.)
  • sybille
    edited March 9, 2010
    Hello,

    If you drag and drop selected text while holding Control + Shift, the rich text formatting will also be copied and pasted.

    The drag and drop process is a little strange: after dropping into the target document, it will seem as though the dragged selection has disappeared. However, if you then click the middle mouse button, the selection should be pasted, with formatting rather than HTML tags.

    I've found this also works with Zotero notes. Select the note in the middle pane, press Control + Shift, without releasing the keys, drag the note to an OOo Writer text document. Release Control+Shift, then middle click. You should see formatted text and no HTML tags.

    Edit: I forgot to mention that this is on an updated Ubuntu Linux installation, using the following software:
    Zotero 2.0
    Firefox 3.5.8+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.10.1 (karmic-security)
    Openoffice.org 1:3.1.1-5ubuntu1.1 (karmic-security)
    and
    Gnome.
    (I'm thinking this may be a Gnome issue, since I believe that the desktop environment controls clipboard-type operations.)
  • fbennett
    Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be working for me, under Ubuntu 10.10 with Open Office 3.2. Zotero version tested is 2.1b4 (w/multilingual patches). Do others find this to work under Ubuntu 10.10 & Zotero 2.1.b4?
  • oasuzh
    The issue with dragging text from Firefox/Zotero into Libreoffice pastes HTML source seems to be a bug in the Linux version of LibreOffice. There is a bugreport for Ubuntu (https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/672139) but no upstream report in the LibreOffice bugtracker.
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