First of all I want to thank you for very interesting program. It looks very promising. For now my workflow is quite cumbersome – several programs for viewing, tagging and denoting. Tropy can replace all of them.
But now it lacks some features for comfortable work:
There should be opportunity to search only notes – for me it is main reason why I can’t use Tropy now as my main software for work with documents. I don’t know, what will bee advanced search and I hope that such opportunity will be there. Maybe it could be some place where user can tick or untick “notes”, “tags”, “names”, “metadata” so he can search only notes, or only notes and tags etc.
Item view is quite uncomfortable after using Tagstoo: https://tagstoo.sourceforge.io/ for viewing large images. This program uses jQuery plugin ABigImage. I don’t know, can it be used in Tropy, but all other viewers feels very uncomfortable after using it because of: a) I can slide touchpad side for zooming in and out; b) a very pleasant way of manipulating very big image only with touchpad so I can zoom in deeply into image and read very small letters without need to touch keyboard or mouse – I can move image to reach all zones of image only moving finger in the touchpad. And it can be customized to work with keyboard too, as I understand.
I can’t hide or even resize metadata/tags pane in item view. It is needed only sometimes (to update metadata or add a tag) but eats a lot of space which can be used by image. It should be the ability to quickly hide and open that pane with button and hotkey.
That are main obstacles for using Tropy for me now.
Some smaller features.
The ability to export of metadata/notes to/from Zotero could be great. It can be quite cumbersome to map Trypy fields to Zotero fields properly, as I understand, because Zotero fields are very strictly limited unlike Tropy. Maybe some mapping tables for users that want export/import?
And I want to second feature request of adding tags to selections: Enhancing annotation: Adding tags to selections Then you can tag only part of paper and get more detailed and relevant selection with tags to selections.
And in the farther future Tropy can turn into free alternative to Maxqda with free notes (without adding to image), pdf import and tagging of selections.
Sorry for a lot of requests, but that is because Tropy fired big hopes in me :).
So thank you for your efforts of creating such great piece of software.
One of the milestones of our current dev cycle relates to advanced search features. This will definitely allow you create search queries constrained to, e.g., notes or metadata, or even specific fields or types of metadata only.
If I understand you correctly your issues with item view pertain to pan/zoom controls and the fact that you can’t hide the panel, right? As to the latter, the panel is the central UI component connecting the two views in Tropy so I’m not sure if we’ll be able to find a good solution to hide it completely; however, we’ve been considering adding a ‘full-screen’ (i.e., fill the window) mode for the image viewer. But we don’t have a milestone in mind for that yet.
Regarding pan/zoom controls, you can already do both using the keyboard or touchpad only, but most of the shortcuts are optimized for using a mouse/touchpad and a few keys. For example, using a mouse or touchpad you can pan via point-and-drag or by using the scrollwheel (usually two-fingers on touchpad); you can zoom in via (shift) double-click or ctrl/cmd scroll; if your touchpad supports it you can also zoom in and out using pinch-to-zoom. If you can be more specific about what kind of controls are missing for you, maybe we can add them (for example, we could easily add a switch for pan/zoom via scrolling so that scrolling zooms by default and pans with ctrl/cmd).
Thank you for answer! I’m waiting advanced search eagerly!
Yes, that’s main issues with item view are such ar you described. Left panel could have two positions: as is now and ability to shrink it into the vertical ribbon so the more space is for the image.
My beloved notes position is side by side, not stacked. Stacked layout is more useful when transcribing text of the image, but it is more comfortable to read short lines of side by side layout than long lines in stacked. And I can see only one line in the latter layout (it depends on screen size), that is minus too. I can resize notes panel but stacked layout is less comfortable for me.
So image became quite small with left panel and notes in the side by side layout. Full window mode can be very handy but there are some drawbacks. Lets say, I want to transcribe text of the document. So I need to see not only image itself, but note panel too at the same time. It could be the third (transcribing) mode – image (with optional?) note panel without meta panel. That would be ideal, I think. But if there is no such possibility, switch between full-screen image and item view by shortcut could be adequate alternative (my workflow is such with other software now).
Tropy pan/zoom is quite good for me – as in most image viewers. What is specifically useful in Tagspaces that it provides ability to move image only sliding in touchpad: I slide my finger to the one direction and image slides in opposite direction. And there is acceleration of moving, so I can slide from one corner of heavily zoomed large image to opposite with one slide. And I can take away finger and continue to move image without doubletapping.
I have to double tap to move image in Tropy only by touchpad but my finger stays on the same place of the image so if there is a big image ant it is zoomed heavily, I need to stop several times (because touchpad is too small), doubletap again and slide to continue. It isn’t very pleasant way, work with mouse or trackpoint is much more comfortable but less pleasant than Tagspaces way.
Tagspaces way of moving images have one drawback: it is usable only in full-screen because moving cursor with finger to, lets say, the notes pane moves image too. So if user can choose both (or more) ways of moving images it could be very good for Tropy, I think.
English isn’t my mother tongue and my knowledge of software terms isn’t very sophisticated so I’m sorry for unclear explanation. You can use Tagspaces to understand what I mean.
And what about tagging of image selections? Page of newspaper can hold a lot of articles and tagging only selected ones can grossly ease workflow.
