Why are the annotation tools greyed out in my PDF reader?

jackrweinstein

What am i doing wrong? I click on the PDF attachment and it pops up on my screen (Windows 11), but I can't click any of the annotation options, nor can I copy and paste the text. I feel like I'm missing something obvious, but I don't know what it is.

Is there a setting I need to fix? Zotero is updated (7.0.24 (64-bit)

dstillman

Can you provide a screenshot?

The annotation tools would be grayed out if the attachment is in the trash or in a library you don't have write access to. You should be able to copy text as long as the PDF has a text layer.

jackrweinstein

I imported a bunch of PDFs and am cleaning up some of the titles and metadata. It is my library on my computer. It happens with all the PDFs unless there are already notes created form them.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u1090953/jw8eo5h1z8j2sjyp9a37.png

dstillman

Those tools aren't grayed out.

dstillman

But you should restart in Troubleshooting Mode (Help → "Restart in Troubleshooting Mode…”), which temporarily disables all plugins.

jackrweinstein

Well, now I feel like an idiot, BUT, I still can't select the text to annotate.

dstillman

You can only select text if the PDF has a text layer.

jackrweinstein

does this mean I have to run OCR on the PDFs? How do you get a text layer? These are all downloaded from JSTOR and the like. They should be OCR already.

If I need to do this, can I do OCR or create a text layer in Zotero?

jackrweinstein

I've found this, which I suppose answers my question. If it's incorrect, please let me know. Thank you for your help!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swKQXs1vqZo

dstillman

It depends entirely on the file. The vast majority of PDFs should have text layers. I don't know if older scanned PDFs from JSTOR do. But you can test this easily with any modern, non-scanned PDF (e.g., something from arXiv).

To be clear, you can select text separately from the annotation tools — that's all you need to do to test this. For the annotation tools, you have to be using either the highlight or underline tool to mark up text.

Again, if you can't select text on a file you think should have it, you should try restarting in Troubleshooting Mode.

jackrweinstein

ok, good idea about troubleshooting mode. Thank you again!