Wrong page number sometimes when citing in the notes

Eseila

Hello!

So i have a book which's full text i opened with the zotero pdf viewer. The book is apparently formated a bit weirdly. The first chapter begins on page 4 of the book. But the pdf viewer shows we are on page 8 already. So when i highlight something in the text and press „add to note“ it cites it automatically as if we were on page 8. Is there a way to tell the pdf viewer that we are actually only on page 4? I could edit the citation manually of course, but when i cite something else i would again have to edit it manually because zotero always thinks we are 4 pages further than what would actually be correct, so to add one more example: When Im on page 18 of the book, the pdf viewer says we are at page 22 and the citation will read „p. 22“.

I wouldve added a screenshot to make it more clear, but apparently thats not possible?

Anyways, i hope you understand. Any solution for this?

Thx!

dstillman

Yes, open the Annotations tab in the left sidebar, open the menu for the first annotation you want to change, and choose "Edit Page Number…". You can choose to change all pages or all later pages.

Eseila

Thanks for the answer dstillman, but thats actually not quite what im looking for.

There seem to be two different ways of taking notes in the zotero pdf viewer. You can use the tools in the top bar „highlight text“, „Add note“, „select area“ and „pick aa color“. Those will then appear in the left sidebar as annotations. Your solution works for this
I never actually used that feature though.

The second form of taking notes is by using the right sidebar and click „Add item note“. I always used this feature. I can select some text then and click „add to note“. It gets cited in my case as (Vogt and Werner, 2014, p. 23) but as stated in the opening post it should be page 19.

I just realised that there are these two different ways of taking notes. Two questions remain: Why are there those two different ways of taking notes? And is there a way to change the page number for that second way that ive been using?

I might as well just switch to the first way, seems to be more powerful, but as said, i didnt know that that existed.

Thanks!

dstillman

Annotating the PDF first is the standard approach — you can add comments to the annotations as you create them and then add them to a note all in one go, as well as view the annotations without creating a note. (There'll also be more ways to view and use annotations separately in the future.)

As a lighter-weight approach, we also make it possible to add text to notes from just a selection, but you would only do that if you know you'd never want the text in any other context, and you can't change the page number that way.

henriquegas

I also have the same question. How can I tell Zotero to match its page couting to the actual pages of the document/pdf. I've been correcting the page numbers whenever I take a note or paste somewhere else but it seems a bit strange that I can't have this working properly and I constantly get worried if I have corrected the page number. Sorry for not actually answering the question but I hope this put back some emphasis to the thread and we can soon enjoy a small software update.

dstillman

@henriquegas: Can you say your actual question, in your own words? I provided answers above, so I don't know what you're asking here.

henriquegas

I ask if there is a way of matching the document pages with the zotero page counting, in my case whenever I highlight some part of the text and then copy it, zotero will give me an automatic citation that is not the the same page number as the PDF's, usualy it gives me a few pages further, I think its because the Zotero counts the pages from the front cover, is there a way to adjust that?

dstillman

Right, so it's what I say above: if you create annotations in the PDF reader, you can adjust the page number for that and all subsequent pages, and those page numbers will be used if you add those annotations to Zotero notes. (This isn't working properly in the Zotero 7 beta, but we'll fix that.) If you just select text and use Add to Note or drag the text to a note, there's no place to adjust the page number, so it will use the auto-detected page number.

One thing we can do is have Add to Note on selected text use previously adjusted page labels from annotations, so you could at least create a single annotation on the first page, adjust its page number, and then get proper page numbers when using Add to Note on selected text. We might also make it possible to set a page number offset for the entire document separately from any annotations, but that would take a bit more work.

For now, though, in a document where page numbers need to be adjusted, you should create actual annotations and then add those to your note.

Obviously Zotero should just auto-detect page numbers in most situations, so if you have a document with clearly labeled page numbers that Zotero isn't currently detecting properly but you think it should, start a new thread describing the problem and email the file to support@zotero.org with a link to the thread.

dstillman

This isn't working properly in the Zotero 7 beta, but we'll fix that.

This is fixed in the latest beta.