Zenreader - collect, organise and combine your knowledge so that you produce great work in less time. Zenreader is used to rapidly build a body of knowledge and evidence from PDF documents and webpages. With Zenreader you read documents, highlight text and images, capture your thoughts and draft excellent evidence-based notes. Zenreader Alternatives. Zenreader is described as 'desktop app to take notes, organise your knowledge and produce great work in no time. It is a powerful productivity tool that includes tagging, reference management and keeping track of your progress' and is an app in the Office & Productivity category. Poetry is the song that poets sing to beautify the world. In A Penny for Your Thoughts, contemporary American poet Penny Johnson presents verses about nature, love, life, death, philosophy, and religion. Learn about the best Zenreader alternatives for your Reference Management software needs. Read user reviews of Mendeley, EndNote, and more. 04/2021: Zenreader: A 4.7 inches E-Ink RSS Reader Powered by ESP32. 03/2021: FOSSASIA 2021: My Showmewebcam talk and more. 02/2021: Your phone vs. 01/2021: Dark, Light, and the open-source microscope. 01/2021: Notes on running Ubuntu Linux on the Thinkpad X1 Nano.
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Posted by Darren McDonald
Dec 3, 2020 at 02:03 PM
I just stumbled on Zenreader. Has anyone used this application? What are your thoughts?
Posted by David Garner
Dec 4, 2020 at 08:50 AM
Thanks for sharing, looks interesting to me.
This is also available for Windows.
There’s a free tier.
I’ve signed up and downloaded it.
Hoping to at least get some new ideas by poking around on it.
Posted by tightbeam
Dec 4, 2020 at 08:24 PM
This looks like very useful, well-coded software.
I particularly value the ability to drag notes, snippets, and other content from the “repository” on the right into the outline on the left.
Does anyone know of other Windows software with this “drag content into outline” feature?
Posted by satis
Dec 5, 2020 at 03:30 PM
It only imports web pages and PDFs. I could see this being useful for many grad students, but I work primarily with ePubs, sometimes even converting PDFs to ePub, because of the better viewing experience with font and text size choice. So this wouldn’t really replace my current workflow.
The outliner component does looks interesting.
The Video Tutorials section is dead, which is disappointing, as I’d wanted to see it a bit more in-depth.
It’s a wrapper app around a service, presumably an Electron app, so I’d like to see how fast or slow it is. I can’t use some Electron apps, mostly because of slowness, sometimes because of strange cross-platform UI conventions employed.
Posted by Carlo M
Dec 9, 2020 at 02:55 PM
Hi all,
I am one of the developers behind Zenreader, thank you very much for the comments. We are working hard to improve on the product and feedback is very appreciated.
We initially started this for grads/postgrads but are looking at bringing this technology to professionals.
We’ll take some time over this holiday break to work on our video section!
As a note, we have built it using Qt and C++ rather than Electron for performance reasons. It isn’t native, but allows our team to distribute on various platforms faster.
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In Zenreader, you work with projects. A project consists of a collection of PDF documents, with all the highlights, notes, tags, outlines and tasks that you produce within this project.
Each project is saved in a folder on your computer.
Zen Reader
Workspace Panels
- - This panel presents a table with all the imported documents and references within the project.
- - This panel allows you to create, edit and remove tags for the whole project. It is hidden by default.
- - In this panel, you can search for words in any of the documents you have imported. N.B. You must first have opened a document at least once, before the search works. It is hidden by default.
The Document Inspector sidebar will allow you to modify the reference information for each document.
Clicking on Kanban View allows you to switch to the Kanban View.
- Create new columns as needed. For example: 'To Read', 'Read', 'Critical Documents'
- Move documents from one column to the next by dragging and dropping them, thus having a clear overview of what needs doing with each document
Create a New Project
- Go to the Welcome Screen and click
Create New Project - Enter the prefered project name
- Optional: Change the default folder where the project is stored. By default projects are saved in your Documents folder.
- Click 'Create Project'
Import an Existing Project
- Go to the Welcome Screen and click
Import Existing Project Choose the project folder after clicking
Locate Project FolderConfirm the import of the project.
N.B. This operation requires the project folder to contain a zenreaderProject subfolder, where we save all the internal project data.
Import documents into a project
To import documents or bibliographic information, you must open the document import screen. This can be done in several ways:
- 1| With a project open, navigate to the Project Workspace screen. Click
Importand choose one of the options.
- 2| Dragging and dropping a folder, a PDF document or a list of PDF documents from your file system anywhere in Zenreader (when a project is open)
Import Document Screen
- You can click Add file(s) and select PDFs to add to a project
- You can click Add folder and select folders that will be scanned recursively for PDF documents. All documents will be added for import
- You can directly drop files and folders and these will be added to the import
You can download webpages by entering valid URLs and a file name
Webpage Import
We are very sorry for any inconveniences caused by the Webpage Import missing
In September we took the decision to disable the direct webpage import in Zenreader because we were relying on a highly defective third party tool which meant that many of our users could not actually import webpages.
We are working on replacing that component with an alternative tool (the web importer converted webpages into PDFs that were then added to a project).
What you can do at the moment:
Use your favourite browser to find webpages.
You can then export the webpage to PDF (we recommend scrolling to the bottom of the page so that all the images load properly and then hitting File → Save As … or heading to the webpage Print options).
From these two options you should be able to generate a PDF export of the webpage. Then you can just drag and drop that into your Zenreader project and start highlighting.
Zenreader detects duplicate documents by comparing file sizes and if file sizes match, comparing the full contents of the file. Duplicates are hidden and will never be imported.
When you are done adding documents, just click Add ... file to project and the documents will all be copied over into the project folder and become available for reading.
Adding Citations Manually
In Zenreader, you can add a Reference directly.
With a project open, navigate to the Project Workspace screen. Click Import and choose Add citation manually.
Just paste the BibTeX, Endnote or RefMan citation text into the box on the left and then choose Create Citation.
Importing Bibliographies
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In Zenreader, you can import a Reference library exported from Mendeley, Endnote, Refman and various other reference management softwares.
Export your reference Library in any of the following formats: BibTeX .bib, Endnote .xml or .enl and RefMan .ris
With a project open, navigate to the Project Workspace screen. Click Import and choose Import Bibliography.
Remove a Project
You can remove a project from the list of projects by clicking the archive icon. This will remove the project from the list, but will not delete the data from your computer. The project folder will remain intact.
You may then import the project again.
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Permanently Deleting a Project
To permanently delete a project, first remove it from the list of projects as described above. Then, go to the folder where the project was located and move it to Trash.
Open documents for reading
You may double click a document in the documents table or Kanban board to open it in the Reader workspace.
You can also click the drop-down menu at the start of the document's row in the table view, which will bring up the option to read the document.
Zenreader
You may also open the document from the Inspector Panel, by clicking the Read button in the Document Information widget.
Zentrader
The first time you do this, Zenreader analyses the text of the document, indexing it, so that the document appears in the global search results.