Indexing and highlighting

srconley · February 15, 2008

I have noticed a problem that when I have a page that is not indexed, the highlight and annotation tools do not work. I wonder if the two are related.

About half my Zotero snapshot pages are not indexed, and do not get indexed when I re-index the database. Even when I go back to the original webpage and take another snapshot, the new page does not get indexed.

Any ideas how to get the highlighting to work? Ways to help Zotero index my pages?

Thanks

Scott

Julia Thornton · February 21, 2008

I just noticed if I take a snapshot of a webpage then highlighting works, but not if I try to use a "store copy of file" .PDF or a snapshot .PDF However it might be the same problem of indexation Scott mentioned. Neither .PDF was indexed, however all my .PDF’s are unindexed (They are usually images of text). The webpage was indexed. I can’t find an unindexed webpage to try it out on, unless they are errors. Neither can I find an indexed PDF.
Is this true that unindexed pages don’t highlight, and is there a work around?
Julia

noksagt · February 21, 2008

@Julia, Zotero can't highlight or make notes on PDFs:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1262/

Julia Thornton · February 24, 2008

Thanks noksagt. That explains it.
I presume the other workaround from a users point of view is to convert the .PDF to a .Doc (or other) thus making it possible to mark and annotate the content but possibly making page numbering a problem for citation purposes?

noksagt · February 25, 2008

Yes--there are two work-arounds:

(1) use a third-party tool (such as Adobe Acrobat) to edit the PDF (but notes won't yet be indexed by Zotero

(2) convert the PDF to something Zotero can mark and annotate (e.g. HTML)

I think that some PDF->HTML programs will retain information on page breaks. If you don't need highlighting & just need annotation, you can convert the PDF into a set of images (one per page) to preserve page numbering.

zhouwe · February 26, 2008

Hi, I am asking help on annotation box:

In order to save highlighted and annotated webpage, I have to snapshot it. Next time I open it, highlighting is still there but annotation texts are gone. Anyone knows how to solve this problem? Thanks a lot.