Can zotero search notes added inside pdf?

ctenorman

Hi,

I'm thinking of adding notes directly inside PDFs. However, when Zotero runs a full-text search through PDFs, will it search those notes as well? If it doesn't do it by default, is there a way it can be made to do it? Thanks!

adamsmith

you can use Zotfile to extract notes from PDFs (and then search notes).
http://www.jlegewie.com/zotfile.html
I don't believe pdftotext, the tool Zotero uses for pdf indexing, reads annotations, so no to the indexing question (though I'm only 80% sure - you'd have to test this yourself).

ctenorman

Grand, thank you!

Gurdas_Sandhu

Can Zotero use the iFilter tool from Acrobat for searching within PDFs?
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=5542

adamsmith

no. It's Windows only and released under a non-free license.

jessriedel

The Extract Annotations feature of ZotFile seems to be difficult to use efficiently. It gathers comments and other annotations on the PDF into a Zotero Note attachment, but it doesn't maintain this well. So if you later add a different comment to the PDF, this won't show up as a Zotero Note attachment unless you run the extraction process again...in which case you now have duplicates of all the old comments.

It seems like PDF comments should be the *easiest* thing for pdftotext to extract from a PDF file. (See agreement from noksagt here: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/7386/search-comments-in-pdfs/ ). If Zotfile can do this, presumably it's possible for Zotero to do it to, although this might require Zotero to run pdf2text *and* pdf.js, which could be cumbersome. I'd very much like to see this solved if possible.

See also development on "Leela": https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=142309

adamsmith

the hope is to eventually switch to pdf.js, which does read notes (it's what ZotFile uses, albeit in a modified version). I wouldn't get my hopes up on this being included in pdftotext, regardless of how easy that'd be, though you can certainly ask them.