unable to annotate articles

AnnaMedendorp · 2026-04-23T04:43:52+00:00

Help! I feel incredibly stupid but I cannot figure out how to annotate articles. I've opened the article in Zotero and can see the buttons for annotations, but they are greyed out and do not work to highlight the text.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u1010570/x8dj4cub614774u0lv19.jpg

I have updated Zotero and looked through the settings, but I can't figure it out.

Thanks in advance for the help!

tim820 · 2026-04-23T05:28:28+00:00

Can you select individual lines of text in that particular PDF in any other PDF reader ? If not, the PDF is likely a scanned (image) PDF that would require processing by OCR to make the text selectable.

mjthoraval · 2026-04-23T08:08:50+00:00

@AnnaMedendorp: If you have opened the PDF file from a Group Library with restricted File Editing settings, you cannot add annotations to it:
https://www.zotero.org/support/groups#library_settings

You would need to copy the item to your personal library to add annotations there.

AnnaMedendorp · 2026-04-23T19:36:48+00:00

@tim820 yes, I can. I think (hope) @mjthoraval is correct and it's something about the File Editing settings. My colleague said the settings looked like I should be able to edit the files, but I'll ask him to double check.

Our hope/goal was to be able to annotate the same articles in Zotero