Rich-text editing of notes and fields

[dstillman]

See also Bruce's comments re: wiki markup/sourcing: ​http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/210/#Item_4

[dstillman]

Requested for fields too: ​http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/336/?Focus=1198

"Article titles often have italicized or underlined text, so text formatting in fields (at least certain ones) is critical."

[stakats]

Based on the forums, it looks like we could begin with support of just underline, bold, italics in note editor. Would also strongly recommend the ability to increase the note font size for readability. No need even to add buttons, just ctrl-u, -b, -i, plus or minus.

Could add the same functionality (without resize) to title fields.

[bdarcus]

Replying to stakats:

Based on the forums, it looks like we could begin with support of just underline, bold, italics in note editor. Would also strongly recommend the ability to increase the note font size for readability. No need even to add buttons, just ctrl-u, -b, -i, plus or minus.

I suggest the font size (and maybe family) be a global option, but that it not be able to be set at the note level until real support for semantic tagging or styling is added.

[bdarcus]

BTW, see ​OmniOutliner Pro for custom named styles. It works for well for this kind of use case. For example, I have styles for quotation, and I can then use their XSLT-based eport plug-in system to transform that to appropriate XHTML (or other formats).

[stakats]

Affected fields would likely be: title, shortTitle, and abstractNote

[stakats]

Bumping up the priority here a bit, since this is one of the few remaining areas where we have a notable functionality gap compared to other reference management software. Where are we on resolving this issue? I'm becoming concerned that we've reached a stalemate here and just need to implement something, anything, that will let users add some basic formatting, notably italics in titles.

[fgibbs]

It might be nice to have the formatting commands consistent across Zotero, and i'm thinking in particular about concordance between this ticket and the custom style editor. For that i've implemented <i>, <b>, <u> for basic formatting because it's intuitive, easy to remember, and easy to document with examples. It could be easily extended to support <sup>, <sub>, etc. for formulas and other style-related requests that have appeared in the forums. (of course it can be changed.) Whatever we do, we should coordinate a consistent implementation across places where the user needs to specify style information.

[fbennett]

I think you want to avoid the pitfall of visual markup here. If a term within a field is set to render in italic, that's going to be swallowed if the style applies italic to the entire string. For fields, in most (possibly all) cases, what you need is a means of specifying that a term in the field be set in an alternative typeface, and let the style engine decide what that's going to be. I'm uploading a knuckle-headed but fairly simple patch that implements a limited version of this as wiki markup (rm to italic, italic to rm). To make things more robust (for rm to underline, say) would require a small extension to CSL in order to give the style control over the choice of typeface.

[fbennett]

Implements alternative typefaces, rm to italic, italic to rm

[dstillman]

Milestone 2.0 Beta 3 deleted

[fbennett]

(Just adding a note here of what everyone already knows, that citeproc-js provides support for in-field rich text markup.)