Creating Zotero-friendly PDFs? (e.g. adding metadata)

bert.lloyd.89 · February 1, 2016

Inspired by "How to make Zotero friendly websites?", I would like to know if there are any best practices for making PDFs with metadata that Zotero can easily process.

In particular, the LaTeX package hyperref makes it easy to set the Title, Author and Keyword fields, but I'm not sure whether this can be extended to other pieces of information that would be useful to Zotero, such as Report Type, Number, Date, etc.

Any suggestions?

Best,
BL

Useful post on hyperref:
http://texblog.org/2012/01/13/setting-pdf-meta-information/

Hyperref manual (see sec 3.7 for information on setting Title, Author, etc)
http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/hyperref/doc/manual.pdf

adamsmith · February 1, 2016

you can't currently do much. Zotero doesn't look at the XMP data for PDFs at all, simply because on average its quality is too low. The best way to make sure Zotero detects a PDF is to, ideally, include a DOI towards the front of it and register that DOI, or to make sure it's getting indexed by google scholar.

bestucan · May 31, 2020

Is there any update for this problem?
It's convenient when give a home made pdf file for presentation.

dstillman · May 31, 2020

Basically the same answer — the best way would be to register a DOI and include it in the first few pages. (PDF recognition no longer uses Google Scholar, so that doesn't matter.) In the absence of an identifier, Zotero will try to extract very basic metadata like title and author from the first page, but we don't have any guidance on that, so you'd have to play around with it.