Annotating PDFs with hypthes.is

philippconzett

I've been testing hypothes.is together with PDFs stored in a Zotero Group libraries. What I typically would do is to open a PDF from a Zotero Group library in a web browser, then click on the hypothes.is button to activate the hypothes.is browser extension (I usually use Chrome for this), sign into hypothes.is, choose the hypothes.is group I want to use, and then start annotating. This works well, and I my annotations show up in my hypothes.is account, and they also show up again when I open the same PDF from the Zotero Group Library. However, I cannot access the PDF from my hypothes.is account. That is, when I click "Visit annotation in context" or "URL", I get a 404 Not Found error message.

I had a chat with hypothes.is support about this. Here is what they answered:

===
It looks like Zotero is not providing a stable URL for your files.

The way activity pages in hypothes.is work is that the client reads the URL you're currently annotating and sends that + the corresponding annotations to activity pages. That info doesn't get updated if the URL changes— it requires a stable URL for the "view annotations in context" links to work.

It could be worth reaching out to Zotero and seeing if they'd be willing to change their practice re: URLs. I'm guessing there are other uses for a stable URL beyond compatibility with Hypothesis.
===

Is there any chance to get this URL practice changed in Zotero?

dstillman

I'm afraid the URL handling is unlikely to change in the near future. For various technical and security-related reasons, attachments (which also include HTML snapshots) are served on a separate, unauthenticated domain, and in order to avoid unauthenticated sharing, they're non-static URLs that expire within a few seconds of the initial load. For now, you'll need to annotate the local PDFs (possibly with some coordination to avoid file conflicts in groups).

adamsmith

(possibly with some coordination to avoid file conflicts in groups).

Since Hypothesis doesn't change files it annotates, that's not a concern. (The PDF is recognized via it's PDF ID, which it while annotations show up from any URL; the same is not true for webpages, unless they have a rel="canonical" meta tag).

dstillman

I'm talking about local file annotations, not with Hypothesis.

adamsmith

You can annotate local PDFs with Hypothesis as long as you open them in Firefox or Chrome (and in the latter case enable local file access for the extension) -- and because of the PDF ID matching, the annotations will show up on synced PDFs wherever/however you open them.
The problem described above is really just that the links to annotations offered by Hypothesis won't work. The only way around that that I can think of is to annotate the PDF at the publisher's site and not the one stored in Zotero. Even that won't work reliably, though, as some publishers like Elsevier also use changing URLs for PDFs (most don't, though).