Built-in PDF reader?

lcoffey

I'm a librarian at an online graduate university who fields questions about using Mendeley vs Zotero, and the feature that keeps me from prying folks away from Mendeley is the built-in PDF reader that allows them to open and annotate. Am I missing this feature somewhere in Zotero or does it not exist?

bwiernik

You can annotate PDFs in Zotero with any pdf program (Adobe, Foxit, etc.). With the Zotfile plugin, you can extract annotations into Zotero notes.

The major problem with Mendeley is that they don’t use the PDF standard annotation protocols, so you can only view the annotations in Mendeley (e.g., you can’t easily email the file to colleagues) and it makes it harder to change programs later if you want. Zotero respects the open PDF standard and lets users choose whatever PDF program they prefer.