pdfinfo / pdftotext file location not allowed by Windows Group Policy

cboulanger

Hi,

at work, the security settings (Windows Group Policy preferences) won't allow me to run pdfinfo-Win32.exe and pdftotext-Win32.exe from the Zotero data directory. Our IT department has ruled out that they will ever allow that. I've seen that you are planning to replace the binaries by PDF.js but that seems to be a medium to long term goal. In the meantime, would you consider adding a setting in Zotero's about:config to allow a different path for those executables?

Thank you.

dstillman

We'll be bundling those with the application in the near future (since all builds are now platform specific), so they'll run from the application directory.

https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/1215

cboulanger

Thanks, that would be great! At the moment, I am always getting warning alerts whenever I add a PDF to a reference.

dstillman

Yeah, if your data directory is noexec you can just delete those from there to avoid those warnings, and indexing will start working again when we bundle the tools.

donnadee

Any status update on the bundling of the tools? We are experiencing the same issue.

dstillman

Yes, they'll be bundled in the next release.

donnadee

Do you have a timeline? I want to let the user know if it will be available for their upcoming project. Thank you

dstillman

The current Zotero beta already uses bundled PDF tools. The next release version should be out within the next couple weeks.

dstillman

In Zotero 5.0.36, available now, includes the bundled PDF tools. (The old executables will still exist in the data directory if they were previously installed, but they're no longer used and will be removed in a future update.)