Sync PDF annotations

andrechappel
Thank you for your help.

When I download references, I also download their associated PDFs into Zotero. I then open the PDFs from Zotero and make annotations such as highlighting. I've noticed that after I annotate PDFs and save them, Zotero does not appear to sync the updated version of the PDF with the annotations. Thus, when I pull up the PDF in Zotero on another computer, none of my annotations appear in the PDF. Is there a way to sync PDF updates?
  • adamsmith
    which program do you annotate them with?
  • andrechappel
    PDF X-Change viewer.

    Perhaps I have already implied the following, but I should also mention that if I re-open the PDF in my Zotero library on the same computer that I used to make the annotations, the annotations show up. It is only when I open the PDF from another computer synced through Zotero with the original computer that the annotations do not show.
  • adamsmith
    I thought that worked - pdf x-change writes annotations directly to the file - problem would seem to be that Zotero doesn't recognize the file has been changed.
    Dan - any insights?
  • dstillman
    edited February 8, 2012
    It has to save the annotations directly to the file and modify the file's timestamp. If it does both of those things, Zotero should upload it on the next sync.
  • andrechappel
    Ok, after checking this again with a new pdf, it seems to be working. I must not have synced one of my libraries when I noticed this before. Thanks for looking into this for me.
  • andrechappel
    I've noticed that this problem is continuing to occur seemingly randomly for me. Sometimes the PDF annotations are synced, but not always. I've tried moving one of these references between collections to see if the modified PDF would show up in the reference in the new collection after syncing. Although the reference is synced to the new location, the annotated PDF is not. Just the same unannotated version.
  • dstillman
    Right, those are unrelated. The collection is part of Zotero's data syncing, whereas the annotations would be handled by Zotero's file syncing, which is a separate process. I can't really tell you much beyond what I said in my previous post, though. Zotero should check the modification time on every sync. If the timestamp has changed, it should sync the file.
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