manually installing PDF indexing binaries

Pete Boyd
On Windows XP it seems the only way to get your modified PDF indexing binaries (pdfinfo-win32.exe and pdftotext-Win32.exe) installed is to be logged in as a particular user and push a button from within Zotero which installs it into the user's own profile directory.

I'm a system administrator and want to script the installation of these binaries for multiple users. I expect to be able to do this by copying the binaries to the Zotero program directory (c:\program files\mozilla firefox\extensions\zotero@chnm.gmu.edu\components).

It seems wrong that the binaries are in Zotero's profile directory, rather than Zotero's program directory.

I can't find these binaries at all on the web. The 'pdf fulltext indexing' page at http://www.zotero.org/support/pdf_fulltext_indexing says the only way to get the binaries is to compile from source code, which seems overly inconvenient.

It would be nice if they were readily accessible.
But I can at least get them from an existing installation.

It's far too inconvenient to manually use Zotero to install them for multiple users. Can I just copy the binaries from an existing installation to new users?
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    The reason Zotero doesn't use the extension directory is that it's deleted and recreated every time Zotero is upgraded, which would require reinstallation of the binaries for the large majority of users.

    We could perhaps have it check the %extdir%/components if the binaries weren't found in the extension directory, but have you tried creating Windows aliases in each user's data directory pointing to binaries elsewhere on the system?
    Can I just copy the binaries from an existing installation to new users?
    Yes.
  • Pete Boyd
    Thanks Dan. We use WPKG to handle installation and upgrades of the software, so including a line to copy the PDF binaries each time the installer was ran would be easy. I appreciate this method isn't open to everyone.

    Having Zotero "check the %extdir%/components if the binaries weren't found in the extension directory" would be great.

    By "alias" do you mean shortcut?
    A shortcut would look like, for example, pdftotext-Win32.exe.lnk, and isn't registered by Zotero.
  • Pete Boyd
    Did you get to implement anything in regard to this in Zotero 2.0?

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