Useful Summary Features

Feature requests
,
#1

Here are a number of summary features that would be really useful to have:

  1. Ability to include figures or images in the summaries. I’d envision this working as a sort of highlight in which one could make a box around a part of the figure and that would then be included in the summary.

  2. It would be nice if the summaries could be filtered in various ways. For example, filtering by highlights or comments, filtering by highlight or comment color, etc. This would pair nicely with an annotation system in which one might reserve particular colors for things like important findings from a paper, comments about research ideas from this paper, critiques of the paper, and etc.

  3. The option to open/view summaries from the main paper menu, rather than having to first load the paper and then open the summary.

  4. Ability to reorder the summary items, in case a different order is preferred.

  5. Ability to edit summary items from the summary page. E.g. adding to comments, creating new comments, and etc.

  6. It would also be nice if summaries didn’t open in a new tab but instead opened as an overlay in the paper.

#2

It seems to me a lot of these features would be automatically available if we could export to Word or Google Doc format instead of PDF - then we could edit to our hearts’ content. The only problem might be retaining the color indicator, which is important; maybe that could be in a heading for each comment rather than a line down the side of it as in the current formatting.

#3

Sure, might as well add “exporting summary to Google Docs” as an additional feature request.

That said, personally, I don’t care for this option at all because that would involve a ton of pointless extra work. E.g. click to export, name the file, select a destination, download it, manually do a ton of copy-pasting to move stuff around, and then upload it to a storage location that’s annoyingly separate from Paperpile and not in sync with it… Doesn’t sound like much fun to me.

I mainly want to be able to drag and drop the summary items to change their order, hide ones I don’t want to see, and edit them directly from the summary console.