Workflow - Organise a journal library of pdf (and html) documents

nikolo

Hello zotero users.

From my computer magazine if have got lot´s of pdf-files. Every editon of the magazine has about 150 pages.

For some reason I want to mark some articles in the pdf-editions.

What is your best workflow to import, mark an article and jump to a specific pdf page (or html anchor).

Is it also possible to import or link to an given folder structure of the pdf or html-files?

Thank you for your reply.

aurimas

Sorry, I don't really follow what you want to do. Can you provide more details?

Maybe this is what you want: You can open a PDF, highlight text or make notes using typical PDF annotation tools (e.g. Adobe reader), save the file. Then in Zotero using ZotFile, you can extract annotations into an attached note. This will copy the highlighted text/notes into Zotero _and_ will create a link that opens the PDF to that particular note/highlight (or at least that page).

nikolo

Dear aurimas,

thank you for your reply.

Think about an annual DVD where all editions of the past year are stored. These files are pdfs and are stored in a special file and folder structure e.g. /14/01/ct1401.pdf and /14/02/ct1402.pdf so on.
ct = http://www.heise.de/ct/alle_ausgaben.html

1. Copy the DVD to usb drive
I copy the folder structure to my portable usb drive into the folder /Documents/library/serverfolder/name-of-magazine/14/01/ct1401.pdf.
Then I start a portable web server.
At my usb-drive are also all portable apps, especially portable firefox ready to use. http://portableapps.com/

2. Import or link the files to the zotero library
I know there are two ways to import (pdf)files. Either via import file (and copy/duplicate) or via a link to a file (and no copy to library). In both cases it is possible to create an search-index.

In my way I use the link option to avoid duplicates and have the possibilty to start a portable webserver on my well known serverfolder structure.

3. Jump to articles / pages in the large pdf
With zotero I mark the articles by creating a journal article with the URL to my local webserver e.g. http://127.0.0.1:5678/serverfolder/file.pdf#page=12&pagemode=none

4. Refer the article to the full pdf
This link to the page of the article is not indexed and cannot be found by the search - so I need to refer the journal article to the full pdf of the edition.


Wishes for comfortable iPad users
Because I am a comfortable iPad user, I want to have access to my library via browser and capture new webpages into zetero. The best idea in my opinion is this:
http://eric-blue.com/2011/04/03/firefox-scrapbook-hacks-viewing-and-saving-webpages-from-anywhere/comment-page-1/

O.K. there are the Zotero Bookmarklet for supported pages, but nothing for random webpages. https://www.zotero.org/downloadbookmarklet

That´s my way. Is this way the easiest or do better ways exist?

Nice greetings

nikolo

adamsmith

That sounds about as good as you can do. Handling whole-issue PDFs is always going to be a bit awkward.

aurimas

3. Jump to articles / pages in the large pdf
With zotero I mark the articles by creating a journal article with the URL to my local webserver e.g. http://127.0.0.1:5678/serverfolder/file.pdf#page=12&pagemode=none

With ZotFile installed you can also attach links to URI in the form zotero://open-pdf/<libraryID>_<itemKey>/<page>, which would reduce reliance on running a server. Though these don't sync AFAIK.

This link to the page of the article is not indexed and cannot be found by the search - so I need to refer the journal article to the full pdf of the edition.

So basically, even if Zotero indexed files when you add a link via URI (which it wouldn't for a number of reasons), you would need it to index _only_ a particular section of the PDF (otherwise, you would get hits for all articles in the issue/edition). Why not just split the PDF into separate articles instead? It's more work, but that's the only way that I can think of making indexing working correctly (all of the methods you describe above would have the same issue).

nikolo

How can I find out the <libraryID>?

adamsmith

afaik, libraryID is always 0 for "My Library"
"Generate report" displays the same _ combo as part of the URL.

nikolo

I tried
zotero://open-pdf/0_AGJQMP5D/3
but no file opens in firefox.