Opening each item in a new tab and keep them all active?

Apologies if this has already been suggested and I missed it. Would it be possible to have the possibility, when clicking on an item, that it opens in a new tab, and that be repeated for each new item you click on? So that several items could be ‘opened’ at the same time – just as you can now have several tabs in Zotero showing several PDFs? Such a feature would be incredibly useful as it would facilitate work when one needs to use several items at the same time.

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Sorry for the late reply! This request has prompted some serious brainstorming on the team and we might be able to find a solution here.

Can you elaborate a little bit on your use case? My impression was that this feature would mainly be useful for large projects where you work on items at the same time which are not too closely related. That is, this feature request would not be used so much to compare items in some way (you’d like to be able to view them side by side for that); but also the items are probably spread across the project and not necessarily connected. For context, if they were indeed connected, i.e. because they’re in a list together or tagged similarly, there may be other viable solutions to quickly switching between them. We’re currently exploring to find a good way to navigate to different items from item view and it would probably make it easy to cycle between items which are close together (such as in the same list) but it would probably not help much if they items you want to switch between are far apart.

You mentioned switching between opened items, but would you also expect to cycle through these items while you’re in project view?

Thanks for your reply and I’m happy in some way that this suggestion caused a team brainstorm :slight_smile:

My use case is the following: my documents are pictures of administrative papers or letters from second half of twentieth century. I’m often comparing phrasings and comparing earlier/later versions of the same documents. When I’m writing one paragraph, I may also simply be using as a source 2 items; and then suddenly have inspiration to work on another paragraph that involves 3 items. But with the current setup, I constantly need to search for each individual items (whether stored in a list or not). Instead, having the 5 items each left “open” in a separate would save me time in searching them again.

I think the best comparison really is Zotero: You can keep the “classic” view listing all your library items (whether in a list or not) and open double click on specific ones to open them in a new tab. This way, you can write a literature review in a separate document, and click on the relevant tab of the relevant reference you need to read (or see your notes) whenever you need. (Instead of having to close the item, search for the relevant item, double-click and open it, and so on and so forth). Does this make sense?

Having said this, I’m not sure the question of the project’s size really matters here. I once did a small Tropy project for an individual article, and that would still have been useful. I think it suffices you need to frequently read more than one item at the same time to benefit from such a feature.

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I wondered whether you had any update on the above?

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Hi, we have some progress on this feature but we can’t announce a roadmap yet.