Highlight and notes not imported from Mendeley

dstillman

This discussion was created from comments split from: Cannot import from Mendeley v.17 - Report ID 1138386369.

luppi272

So I have downloaded Mendeley v18 - the Zotero importer worked without error, but although the papers and folder structure are indeed present, the highlights and notes are still missing. Do I need to do something extra to get them imported?
Thanks a ot!

dstillman

By "notes" do you mean annotations in PDFs or something else?

Unfortunately Mendeley stores PDF highlights and annotations in its own database instead of in the PDF itself (where they'd be accessible to other programs). Zotero extracts the annotations from the database into a child note under each item with links to the original PDF pages. Highlights and the annotations themselves won't be present in the file after import, though (because to do so we'd need to somehow write those back to the PDF file, which is pretty complicated and really Mendeley's job).

Mendeley does let you export individual PDFs with annotations and highlights included, so one option would be to export specific PDFs you care about, do a right-click → Show File on the attachment item in Zotero, and swap in the exported PDF with the same filename. But you'd have to do that one file at a time — as far as I know you can't even do that for multiple files at once in Mendeley.