Upgrade StorageWeb page annotation - a working solution
I just wanted to share my solution to annotate web pages.
Web page annotations are a crucial feature for me. Back in time I used a firefox plugin, Wired-marker which is the best in class to annotate web pages. However it duplicated zotero function and my research is splitted in half. That was annoying.
Lately I found a turnaround. I installed "Print pages to Pdf" another firefox plugin. First a take a regular snapshot of the page. Then with one click I transform my page to PDF(The plugin shows it in firefox.) Then I drop the icon of this PDF page to my snapshot. Zotero downloads, attaches and renames the pdf automatically. (with the help of Zotfile)
From this point on, I annotate the PDF version of the page with PDF xchange viewer plugin within firefox. (When I click on my captured page, the pdf opens in firefox ready to be annotated)(Save it before exiting)
The whole work flow stays in firefox and PDF xchange viewer offers richer abilities like to draw shapes, arrows, circles etc, in addition to multi colored highlihts and notes. You can easily cycle, go to and search your annotations with the comments pane of PDF viewer. You may produce several hundred annotations for a long classical text for example and not get lost.
A last but not least plugin zotfile, then extracts my annotations from captured PDF and compiles them to one zotero note. (An additional click is needed, but you may as well keep your annotations on only captured PDF)
To sum up: with just two more clicks , I have an unparalled annotation tool for web pages seamlessly working with zotero. You need 3 free firefox plugins: 1-PDF xchange viewer, 2- Print pages to Pdf, 3-Zotfile . Once correctly customized you will never look back.
(Other PDF viewers like foxit may work but I did not experiment with them)
Additional benefit: zotero captures a web page with all the clutter of files going with it, tons of pngs, js and html. While capturing this as a pdf produces just one file, i.e pdf itself. With zotfile you can later re-annotate your PDF page capture in a tablet or mail it to another person easily.
Web page annotations are a crucial feature for me. Back in time I used a firefox plugin, Wired-marker which is the best in class to annotate web pages. However it duplicated zotero function and my research is splitted in half. That was annoying.
Lately I found a turnaround. I installed "Print pages to Pdf" another firefox plugin. First a take a regular snapshot of the page. Then with one click I transform my page to PDF(The plugin shows it in firefox.) Then I drop the icon of this PDF page to my snapshot. Zotero downloads, attaches and renames the pdf automatically. (with the help of Zotfile)
From this point on, I annotate the PDF version of the page with PDF xchange viewer plugin within firefox. (When I click on my captured page, the pdf opens in firefox ready to be annotated)(Save it before exiting)
The whole work flow stays in firefox and PDF xchange viewer offers richer abilities like to draw shapes, arrows, circles etc, in addition to multi colored highlihts and notes. You can easily cycle, go to and search your annotations with the comments pane of PDF viewer. You may produce several hundred annotations for a long classical text for example and not get lost.
A last but not least plugin zotfile, then extracts my annotations from captured PDF and compiles them to one zotero note. (An additional click is needed, but you may as well keep your annotations on only captured PDF)
To sum up: with just two more clicks , I have an unparalled annotation tool for web pages seamlessly working with zotero. You need 3 free firefox plugins: 1-PDF xchange viewer, 2- Print pages to Pdf, 3-Zotfile . Once correctly customized you will never look back.
(Other PDF viewers like foxit may work but I did not experiment with them)
Additional benefit: zotero captures a web page with all the clutter of files going with it, tons of pngs, js and html. While capturing this as a pdf produces just one file, i.e pdf itself. With zotfile you can later re-annotate your PDF page capture in a tablet or mail it to another person easily.
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/23704/create-and-attach-pdf-from-snapshot/
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/9183/htmltopdf-workflow/
It was a pleasure to discover that adamgolding has a very similar color coding scheme to what I use.
I believe the whole process could be even more automated in autohotkey. I will give a try as soon as I will have time.
I use already an autohotkey script to tidy copy problems with line feeds etc when pasting to Word from PDF.
Another script work for ibids. I just push a key and enter only page numbers.
In Chrome I'm using Web2PDFConverter https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/web2pdfconverter/bkanhckocooacphbnclgcndnpfpoppdk/related which does the trick nicely.