Like the desktop version, Read Aloud on iOS reads PDFs, EPUBs, and webpage snapshots to you in high-quality, natural-sounding voices. It automatically skips in-text citations, headers and footers, and tables, and you can quickly skip ahead by sentence or paragraph or start reading from a given spot. While you’re listening, an Annotate Sentence button highlights or underlines the current sentence with a single tap, so you can make note of important points without selecting text by hand.
Read Aloud on iOS keeps reading if you lock your device or switch to another app, and you can use standard iOS methods (lock-screen controls, buttons on AirPods, Siri) to pause and resume or skip ahead by sentence. When you stop reading, Read Aloud remembers your exact position, so you can pick up later right where you left off.
The iOS version features the same voices as the desktop app. From the Zotero 9 announcement:
Read Aloud requires an internet connection and a Zotero account for high-quality voices, which we’re calling Zotero Voices. If you’d like to use Read Aloud offline, you can still use the text-to-speech voices available on your system, but the quality will be significantly degraded.
We offer two tiers of Zotero Voices: Standard and Premium. Standard voices are generated on Zotero servers, with unlimited minutes for Zotero Storage subscribers and 2 hours/month for free accounts. Premium voices are the highest-quality voices available, processed by external text-to-speech providers — they make fewer mistakes, sound more natural, support many more languages, and can handle multilingual text. Individual Zotero Storage subscribers will receive up to 2 hours of Premium usage (varying by voice) each month, and free and institutional accounts will also receive a small quota in order to try the voices out.
For now, you can request additional Premium minutes for free if you run out. We’ll provide more details on monthly allocations and options for adding additional minutes at a later date.
We’re excited to announce Zotero 10, which adds a host of powerful new features for searching and managing your library, a major improvement to Read Aloud, and a new Reading Mode for PDFs.
More-Advanced Advanced Search
Advanced search is now available via a filter button in the quick-search bar, and it opens right above the items list in the main window. You can filter any view, including collections or saved searches, and immediately work with the results.
Searches are now much more powerful, with support for nested condition groups and automatic mapping of conditions across levels of the hierarchy. It’s now trivial to, say, search for top-level items with a given author AND (a descendant annotation that is either yellow OR red). For any search, you pick what result level you want to find (e.g., “top-level items” or “annotations”), and the search conditions you use will automatically be mapped to that result level. So you can find top-level items even if you’re searching for annotation content two levels below or find all annotations underneath top-level items with a given tag. Searching for attachments within collections or combining conditions across the hierarchy used to require chaining multiple saved searches, and those searches can now be represented easily in a single search.
Clicking the advanced-search button with something entered into the quick-search bar will automatically populate an equivalent advanced search. Since the advanced-search pane persists when you click between collections, this also addresses the longstanding request to be able to pin searches when moving between collections.
Finally, we’ve added various new search conditions for annotations (e.g., “Annotation Color”) and counts (e.g., “# of Notes”) as well as “is empty” and “is not empty” operators.
Accent-insensitive searching and other search improvements
Most searching throughout Zotero now ignores accents, typographic characters, and formatting. Searching for “cafe” will find “café”, “can't” will find “can’t”, and “h2o” will find “H<sub>2</sub>O” and “H₂O”, and vice versa.
Full-text content searches — the “Attachment Content” condition in advanced search and quoted phrases in the quick-search bar — are also now much faster, returning results nearly instantly instead of scanning files on disk.
Searching for Chinese, Japanese, or Korean text in the quick-search bar previously matched attachment content containing any individual character of the search terms unless the search was quoted. Unquoted CJK searches now match the full phrase, and do so quickly.
We’ve also overhauled how Zotero processes attachment content in the background, indexing new content faster and more reliably. If you’re using syncing, be sure that “Sync full-text content” is enabled in the Sync settings, which allows you to search full-text content already indexed elsewhere even if a file isn’t available locally (e.g., when using on-demand file downloads) and avoids unnecessary indexing work on multiple devices.
Multi-Collection Selection
It’s now possible to select multiple rows in the collections pane and view items from across all of those views.
For example, you can now select two collections to quickly see all the items from both of those collections, or select a few saved searches to see the combined results from those searches.
Multi-selection also works across libraries, so you can view, search, and interact with items from different libraries. The items list groups items by library, with a sticky header for the current library shown at the top as you scroll up.
Select All (Cmd/Ctrl-A) automatically expands to all rows within the same parent or parents, so you can select two subcollections under two different parents and quickly select all of their siblings. (This might be an alternative to using View → Show Items from Subcollections.) Select All on a library will select all other libraries in your database.
All of this works with the new in-window advanced search, so you can perform complex searches across multiple collections or even across all libraries in your database.
Undo Support
You can now undo and redo many operations via Edit → Undo/Redo or the standard platform keyboard shortcuts. If, say, you overwrite the wrong field by mistake, or you drag a collection somewhere by mistake, you can just press Cmd/Ctrl-Z to undo the changes.
Not all operations are currently covered (e.g., deleting an annotation from the items list), but we’ll be looking to extend support to more operations in future updates.
Batch Editing
You can now easily edit multiple items at once. Simply select multiple items in the items list, click “Edit Multiple Items…” in the item pane, and then make changes, and the changes will be applied to all selected items. Fields that have multiple values will show “Multiple”, and clicking in the field will show the available values (and “Clear all values”).
This works with the new undo support, so if you make an accidental change across many items, you can easily undo it. The new in-window advanced search also makes it easy to find particular sets of items to edit.
It’s not currently possible to edit item type, creators, or tags on multiple items at once, but we hope to support those in future updates.
Smarter Read Aloud
Read Aloud should now do a much better job of skipping in-text citations, headers, and footers. It’ll also skip past tables, figures, and equations instead of reading out every table cell and axis label, and it’ll read paragraphs straight through even when they continue in the next column or on the next page.
For large documents, it should also start speaking more quickly.
This is all based on a new custom document-analysis system that identifies different elements of a PDF, EPUB, or snapshot. We’re still refining this system, so if you find a document where Read Aloud is still reading things it shouldn’t — or skipping things it shouldn’t — let us know in the Zotero Forums.
By default, Read Aloud will also now highlight individual sentences as it reads them instead of highlighting entire paragraphs, and we’ve added dedicated buttons to skip ahead or back by sentence. If you prefer to have it highlight by word or paragraph instead, you can configure that from the General pane of the settings. (Word highlighting is available only for some voices.)
Reading Mode for PDFs
Zotero 10 adds Reading Mode for PDFs: a clean, reflowable view of the document, with adjustable font, size, and line spacing, and without the headers, footers, and multi-column layouts of the original. If an area of the PDF page can’t be represented as text (images, tables, figures), it’ll be rendered as shown in the original PDF, so you won’t miss any content.
Reading mode in most apps — if they even offer one — is read-only. In Zotero’s, you can keep annotating: you can highlight and underline text and add notes directly in Reading Mode, and those annotations show up in the normal PDF view as well. (Annotations made with the other tools — text, image, and ink — are shown only in the PDF view, though we plan to show them in the sidebar in a future version.) Your reading position carries over when you switch, too.
To turn it on, click the Reading Mode button in the reader toolbar.
Reading Mode is powered by the same custom document-analysis system behind the Read Aloud improvements, and we’re still refining it. If a document doesn’t look right in Reading Mode — missing text, mangled tables, etc. — let us know in the forums.
Other Changes
Zotero 10 includes many other improvements and fixes, including an improved Zotero Connector for Safari, a citation preview in the citation dialog, and dramatically lower memory usage from reader tabs. See the changelog for a more complete list of changes.
Get Zotero 10
If you’re already running Zotero, you can upgrade from within Zotero by going to Help → “Check for Updates…”.
We’re excited to announce Zotero 9, which introduces a major new way to engage with your documents, along with a host of other improvements to the research workflow.
Coming less than three months after Zotero 8, Zotero 9 is the first major update since we announced a faster release cycle for Zotero, and it represents our commitment to getting stable features into the hands of users more quickly.
Read Aloud
Read Aloud reads your documents to you in high-quality, natural-sounding voices. It works on PDFs, EPUBs, and webpage snapshots.
To get started, just click the headphones button in Zotero’s reader toolbar.
As you’re listening, you can skip forward or backward by paragraph or by sentence (Option/Alt-click or Option/Alt-left/right), and you can start reading from a particular point by clicking in the left margin or by right-clicking and choosing “Read Aloud from Here”.
An “Annotate Sentence” button — or H or U on your keyboard — will automatically highlight or underline the last sentence you heard, and you can use shortcut keys to quickly move, expand, or delete the new annotation.
Your last reading position is saved and synced between devices, so you can pick up where you left off on any device.
Read Aloud requires an internet connection and a Zotero account for high-quality voices, which we’re calling Zotero Voices. If you’d like to use Read Aloud offline, you can still use the text-to-speech voices available on your system, but the quality will be significantly degraded.
We offer two tiers of Zotero Voices: Standard and Premium. Standard voices are generated on Zotero servers, with unlimited minutes for Zotero Storage subscribers and 2 hours/month for free accounts. Premium voices are the highest-quality voices available, processed by external text-to-speech providers — they make fewer mistakes, sound more natural, support many more languages, and can handle multilingual text. Individual Zotero Storage subscribers will receive up to 2 hours of Premium usage (varying by voice) each month, and free and institutional accounts will also receive a small quota in order to try the voices out. Initially, all subscribers can request additional Premium minutes for free. In the near future, we’ll provide more details on monthly allocations and options for adding additional minutes going forward.
Read Aloud is currently available only in the desktop app, but it’ll be coming to the iOS and Android apps soon.
Recently Read
A new Recently Read collection at the top of the collections list in each library shows items with attachments you’ve recently read, most recent first. Opening an attachment or changing pages will bump the item to the top of the list.
The collection includes a Last Read column, which you can also add to other views, and “Attachment Last Read” is available as an Advanced Search condition.
The last-read time syncs between devices, so you can quickly find a file on another device that you’ve read elsewhere.
Insert Annotations Directly into Word Processor Documents
The word processor plugins now feature a new Add Annotation button that lets you insert one or more annotations directly into your document, with active Zotero citations that automatically generate bibliography entries.
Previously, you could add annotations to Zotero notes and insert notes into your document with active citations, but it’s no longer necessary to create an intermediate note if you prefer to work directly in your word processor.
Add Annotation opens a new mode in the citation dialog that expands attachments to show individual annotations. You can browse or search for annotations, choose one or more, and then add them to your document, along with active citations and any comments you added. Image and ink annotations are inserted as images.
“Added By” and “Modified By” for Group Libraries
You can now add “Added By” and “Modified By” columns to the items list in group libraries, letting you see and sort by the people who created and last updated items.
These fields also show in the metadata list along with Date Added/Modified.
Per-Group File Renaming Settings
Group admins can now configure file-renaming settings for each group library, ensuring consistent filenames for all group members.
Performance Improvements
We’ve made some major improvements to Zotero’s performance, including reducing startup memory usage by 20% and drastically reducing disk access and network requests during file syncing in some situations.
On macOS, Zotero now uses a feature of the modern Apple filesystem to avoid additional disk-space usage when copying files. This includes the automatic daily backups Zotero makes of its database, potentially saving hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes of local disk space.
Web-Based Login
You now log in to your Zotero account via the browser instead of entering credentials in the app. This allows you to use a password manager to auto-fill credentials and will enable two-factor authentication (currently in beta), greatly increasing the security of your Zotero account.
Zotero 8, which we announced today, is a huge release, representing more than a year of development. It brings together a large number of new features, improvements, and internal changes that have been in progress for quite some time.
Going forward, we’ll be changing how we manage Zotero releases, with the goal of getting stable features out to all users more quickly.
Instead of waiting months for a large update, we plan to release new versions of Zotero on a regular, rapid schedule, roughly every 6–10 weeks. These releases (Zotero 9, Zotero 10, and so on) will include new features and improvements that are ready for general use.
Between these feature releases, all changes will continue to appear immediately in the Zotero Beta, and we’ll periodically publish maintenance updates (such as Zotero 8.0.1) that include only bug fixes and small refinements to recently released features.
For Zotero users, this means:
New features will reach everyone sooner
Bug fixes are less likely to be tied to major releases
Updates will be smaller and more predictable
If you’ve been running the Zotero Beta mainly to get early access to new features, but aren’t interested in running beta software or reporting issues in the Zotero Forums, we recommend switching to the regular release version of Zotero from the download page. With more frequent releases, you won’t need to wait long to get new functionality.
