Better Notes Display

Hi, I would like a feature that shows just the Notes on a list without showing the full reference thus after locating the Note this can be selected and now lead to the reference. Sometimes I don’t remember the Note and having to filter the references with Notes takes more time than necessary since it shows only three or four notes on the entire screen.

We have plans to overhaul the note taking system later this year. We are going to include also the comments/highlights added to PDF files. There will also be changes to the UI that should make view notes more easily.

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This is the one thing I miss from using Bookends (other ref programs have it too I think). With Paperpile, I have no way to see annotations without opening a PDF. Ideally, I’d like to be able to tag annotations, search highlights, and copy-paste highlights as quotes with reference included. Seems like there’s lots of usable space on the right side of screen where all the sorting/filtering options are. Could the annotations flow down the side when an article is selected?

I really like to work within one window as much as possible, so I’d love it if annotations could find their way into Paperpile’s sidebar within Google Docs. Imagine selecting which label (or folder) to include and a stream of notes and references below. Perfect for those of us who don’t get as much use from the in-line citation shortcut because we can’t remember the author, so we switch to Paperpile, open 1,2 or 3 PDFs looking for for confirmation of which author wrote it.

Let’s get crazy and have Cmd-Shift-P search tags and/or annotations too.

I’m guessing all of these requests would require writing/syncing the embedded annotations to a secondary database. (And I’m one of those people who refuses to use ReadCube or others that do this instead of writing to the PDF, so I’m not complaining. Sorry for the free-association of feature requests.)

I am starting to use the notes feature more, to write my own reviews for each paper.

The notes feature seems like it isn’t a first class citizen. I would enjoy the following if they were implemented:

  • Notes are displayed as the first comment when opening a document in the comment sidebar, perhaps in a different colour
  • I would clicking a document to open up Notes if they have any instead of opening up the abstract
  • A stronger visual indicator if a document has notes, like the notes icon changing colour (to the bluish colour used for text maybe?), or perhaps even a different icon.

I noticed after writing this that it does turn darker. I guess that wasn’t a big enough change to have made me notice it beforehand