Zotero very slow when saving PDFs

danielreedersanu · January 22, 2014

This is not a bug report. I just wanted to highlight a lesson I just learned. If you enable pdftotext in the Search tab of the Preferences box, saving PDFs may cause Firefox to temporarily 'freeze up' while it searches the PDF you are saving for comments. If you're saving a number of PDFs or a large PDF this can take a while. I can't work out a way to disable pdftotext once it has been installed, but I was able to change the number of pages it scans to 1, and importing a large RIS file from Endnote took much less time.

adamsmith · January 22, 2014

a much faster indexing tool - that's the part that actually takes time - is under very active development and given the messages on that patch it'll almost certainly be in Zotero 4.1 (still a bit out). Note that setting the indexing to 1 page (you can also set it to 0) does, of course, render full text search in your attached PDFs mostly useless.

dstillman · January 22, 2014

I'm actually going to consider backporting the patch to 4.0, since it so dramatically speeds up indexing. I'll post here with any updates.