Search comments in PDFs?

JonEP
Hi,

I'm wondering if it is possible to set Zotero to search in a PDF's comments--that is, when the comments have been added by, for instance, Adobe Acrobat prior to import into the Zotero library.

I tried adding a PDF with comments and highlighting created by Acrobat to my Zotero collection. The highlighting and comments are visible in the preview pane, but searching the library for text found within the comment produced no hits.

Thanks,
Jon
  • noksagt
    Short answer: Not yet.

    Maybe in the future, but it may take some work & it might be a request worth sending upstream

    More details: Zotero uses 'pdftotext' (from xpdf) to obtain full-text from the PDF. I do not believe that this program has the ability to include comments in the output.

    Annotations made by the review & comment tools in acroread are in plaintext in the PDF file (you can use 'strings' to see them). It should probably be possible to improve 'pdftotext' to optionally include it or to use some other tool like 'strings' to extract the full text.
  • JonEP
    Hi,

    Thanks for your reply. I suppose this all ties in to my desire to have Zotero be my main platform for archiving, viewing, annotating and analyzing PDFs, ideally with the possibility of making notes on, and tagging, specific portions of text within a PDF. Up until now I've been reading PDFs in Acrobat and, from time to time, making notes, highlighting, etc. Not having committed fully to zotero at this point, I have been a bit leery of doing much analysis through the Zotero interface (fearing that in the future I may switch to an application that allows for tagging portions of text, etc., and would thus lose my work)... So I'd been trying to continue along the same path as before (reading and commenting in Acrobat) and then use Zotero for searching and reference management... The Acrobat search feature is itself somewhat weak (it takes a long time, requires hands-on work by the user to re-index, and has a somewhat clunky interface).

    Anyway, the quest for the holy grail continues...

    Perhaps sending the request upstream would be worthwhile---how does one do that?

    Thanks again,
    Jon
  • noksagt
    Actually, the request has already been made to poppler (the de facto successor to xpdf):
    https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10300
Sign In or Register to comment.