shalabhc
commented
6 years ago The ability to customize the title would be very useful. For instance, many PDFs do not have good metadata and we end up with meaningless titles like "ngc98.pdf" (https://hypothes.is/a/_8XCnOHJEeeAXlc1u38s-A). The problem extends to web pages too - titles may be unclear.
It would be great if the displayed title is customizable and user specific (i.e. similar to annotations and highlights, could be private). An example workflow could be:
- User highlights some text in a document and saves the highlight
- User adds the 'title' tag to the saved highlight
- In subsequent searches, whenever the document returned, the highlighted text is displayed as the title, instead of the original title. Alternatively, a page note could be similarly promotable to a title.
In the end I just want to be able to customize the titles so that all search results are meaningful and I don't have to click on each to see what the document was about.
klemay
mkdir-washington-edu
mattdricker
rateldajer
mforbes
stockphrase
datavistics
robertknight
Feature request from a user: https://hypothesis.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/857
When people annotate a document in Hypothesis the title of that document (shown in activity pages etc) is whatever title the client extracted from that document the first time anyone annotated the document. If the author of the document changes the title, say from a temporary title to the final one, the title will never be updated in Hypothesis.
Instead of always sticking to the first title that we ever saw for a document, we could instead use the latest title that we've seen for that document. That might fill this particular user's need, although after the author has changed the title of a document someone needs to create a new annotation of that document in order to trigger the document's title to be updated in Hypothesis. The downside is that it might be confusing if the titles of documents change on activity pages.
Alternatively we could allow users to edit the title of a document in Hypothesis, but then which users should be allowed to edit which document titles?
Group admins could be allowed to edit the titles of documents in their groups, and those new titles would only be shown when the document is viewed in that group and not when the same document is seen in public or in another group. But this gets complicated to implement and potentially confusing to users (the same document having different titles on different Hypothesis pages).
Implementation notes:
Doing some quick testing if the title of an annotated document changes and then someone makes a new annotation of the document then we do store the new title in the
document_metatable in the database, and in fact we overwrite the old title and no longer have it in thedocument_metatable. But on activity pages it is somehow still the old title that is shown.I think this must be because the document's title is also denormalised into the
documenttable in the db, and we don't update that denormalized copy when the title changes.