No spaces between words in PDFs downloaded to Zotero

rholway · January 19, 2019

I'm using the FireFox plug-in to download PDFs of articles from JSTOR. When I copy text from the PDF to past into a Zotero child note for the article, there are no spaces between words. They all run together. If I open rather than download the file, and copy and paste a portion into Word, there are spaces between words--as well as extra paragraph returns (which I can clean up). Is there any other solution to this problem? It may not apply to all PDFs from all sources. I'm only just starting to use Zotero for this.

adamsmith · January 19, 2019

Zotero doesn't make any changes to PDFs it downloads -- are you copying and pasting from the same software to the same software when you're testing this? Otherwise, that's the issue (e.g. Zotero notes behave differently from Word when copying from clipboard)

rholway · January 19, 2019

I am copying from the pre- and post-download PDF offered by JSTOR, either directly into a Zotero child note or into a Word doc and from there into a child note. One work-around is to subscribe to the add-on to Acrobat reader that generates a MS Word doc from a PDF and then open the doc in Word and copy from it to the Zotero child note. Another possible work-around is to copy from the on-screen downloaded article that JSTOR generates before allowing you to save it as a PDF. Not perfect, but better than copying from the saved PDF. Anyway thanks for your comment. It does seem to be a characteristic of the PDF file rather than anything to do with Zotero.

DWL-SDCA · January 19, 2019

I find that the run-together problem has been frequent when I use Mac Preview but not with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. Another workaround is to copy first to a text editor and then recopy and paste. When I use Adobe Reader I don't encounter this problem. I don't need to convert anything to Word or use the text editor trick.