Note Formatting

New user here, really struggling to use the note function. It needs some very basic formatting pieces, like the ability to skip lines and the ability to paste text into it without it going buggy. The pdf annotations are great, but they also don’t allow much formatting, aren’t ideal for longer notes, and are tied to specific parts of a paper. I need a place to write longer notes about an article as a whole. Right now it seems like I’m going to have to leave Paperpile and do this in Docs, which I hate to do. Is this planned? Are there workarounds or settings I’m not seeing? Anything??

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Hi Chante, welcome to PP. Notes that are not tied to a specific place in the paper, and longer notes, should really go into the DETAILS section of the PP entry. I’ve previously suggested custom fields, which would be ideal for this. As a workaround, use one of the currently defined fields, such as CUSTOM SUBTYPE. You won’t be able to display the whole note, but you will be able to store it.

Thanks, Bruce! As I’m playing with using custom subtype, the enter key closes the note instead of moving to the next line. Is there a way to add lines (e.g. new paragraphs?). Second, is there a way to then export these notes?

Not directly relevant to your query, but the pdf notes allow for markdown formating- specifically, if you write [text](url), you will be able to press the link to go the url; I use it to link the note to a related entry in Paperpile.

That could be useful! Thanks!

Hi @Chante! Thanks for the feedback here. Library notes are purposefully simple and don’t support any formatting, including line breaks. The request to add some formatting options has come up before, so I’m adding your +1 to the topic on our internal tracker for the team to consider. Perhaps not a current priority but it’s on our radar.

Agree that note formatting would be immensely useful (this is available in, for example, Zotero)! Please add another enthusiastic and slightly frustrated +1