exporting PDFs

somainer

With help from the always most awesome & patient adamsmith, I have been able to configure access to my zotero database from my tablet (iPad) using Papership and box.com (details in Zotfile thread).. but an unintended consequence of this switch is that I am no longer able to use the Renaming feature of Zotfile, which allowed me to replace Zotero's cryptic names with Author - Year - Title ( or whatever one prefers), which greatly facilitates sharing with colleagues and students.

So, fellow Zotero users:

a) how can I send select items in Zotero to someone INCLUDING the annotated PDFs (either manually chosen, or perhaps an entire collection)?
b) is there a way to send PDFs WITHOUT my annotaions?
c) how can I export ALL of my annotated PDFs, renamed as Author-Year-Title (as an archival backup, or to be shared with others)?

aurimas

how can I send select items in Zotero to someone INCLUDING the annotated PDFs (either manually chosen, or perhaps an entire collection)?

how can I export ALL of my annotated PDFs, renamed as Author-Year-Title (as an archival backup, or to be shared with others)?

You can use ZotFile's "Send to Tablet" feature to copy PDFs to an arbitrary folder and rename them. You can then attach these PDFs to emails. ZotFile does tag such PDFs in Zotero so you can pull in changes that were made. Not sure if you can disable this tagging for your purposes.

is there a way to send PDFs WITHOUT my annotaions?

Not natively, since Zotero doesn't manage PDF internals at all (besides indexing them for searching). I'm not aware of such feature existing in ZotFile either. You can strip annotations (by saving without annotations) using many PDF readers, though that's generally not available as a batch function.

aurimas

But also, Zotero does automatically rename the _automatically_ attached PDFs on import (you can manually rename via right-click otherwise). The setting is enabled by default and can be controlled via hidden preference (attachmentRenameFormatString). You can check the file name in the right-hand pane or by right-click -> Show File.

Depending on your OS and the application you use to send emails, you can just drag-and-drop the file attachment from Zotero into an email. This works on Windows with Gmail, for example.

adamsmith

as for c) for back-up see: https://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data#backing_up_your_zotero_library
several export formats (including e.g. RIS or Zotero RDF) allow you to export files along with the metadata. As the first link says, those aren't full back-ups.