Take notes on or transcribe the content of an item.

To transcribe or take notes on your item, click in the bottom pane of the item view and begin typing. Your notes autosave as you type. You can come back to the notes pane at any time to continue to edit your notes. Notes attach to individual photos or selections within your item, rather than the item itself, but you can always see a list of your notes in the notes pane on the lefthand side of the item view.

To change from the stacked layout (the photo editor on top of the notes pane) to side-by-side, right-click in the notes pane or photo editor and select View Layout. Then select Side by side.

Notes formatting toolbar

You can format your notes using the toolbar at the top of the notes pane. Select the text you want to format and click the button on the toolbar. Functions available for formatting are:

• Boldface [Ctrl/Cmd + b]

• Italic [Ctrl/Cmd + i]

• Underline [Ctrl/Cmd + u]

• Strikethrough [Shift + Ctrl/Cmd + t]

• Block quote [Shift + Ctrl/Cmd + > or Shift + Ctrl/Cmd + .]

• Superscript [Shift + Ctrl/Cmd + p]

• Subscript [Shift + Ctrl/Cmd + b]

• Bulleted list (the last two buttons allow you to have multiple levels of indent on your lists for both bullet and enumerated lists)

• Enumerated list

• Hyperlink

  • Note that to use a hyperlink, you will need to Ctrl/Cmd + click on the hyperlink in the notes field.

Several formatting actions are taken for you automatically, including creating em and en dashes. To remove the automatic formatting, press Backspace (Delete for macOS) immediately after the keystroke that creates the automatic formatting. Your text will then revert to the original keystroke.

Multiple notes

Tropy items can have as many notes as you want. To add a new note, click the + on the notes pane. This functionality allows you to both transcribe and take notes on your items and keep all your work in one place.

Multiple modes of writing

Tropy allows you to write both horizontally (left to right) and vertically. To switch to vertical mode, type in the notes field and then right-click in the notes field. From the context menu that appears, navigate to Writing Mode >Vertical. You can have only one writing mode per note, so you'll need to create multiple notes in order to take notes in multiple modes about the same photo.

Line numbers and line wrap

You can turn on line numbers in your note by typing in the notes field, then right-clicking. From the context menu that appears, click on Show Line Numbers. Line wrap is on by default; to turn it off, click on Wrap Lines.