Zotfile Implementation ... late

army-jag341
Hi everyone,
I recently discovered many of Zotero's add-ons, including Zotfile, which I can now add to the "I wish I knew" list. I cannot help to wonder whether there is a way to implement Zotfile this late into a project without an excruciating time-consuming process. All my highlighted PDFs are located in a folder, and I extracted those quotes into Excel and added keywords to relate them among each other. Still, since I have done this over a long period of time, consistency is not particularly strong. The motivation for exploring this is that I have a hard time locating the relevant quotes using Excel's auto-filter. It appears that Zotfile would do a better and faster job facilitating this. Thank you in advance for your thoughts and help.
  • adamsmith
    If you're starting with this now, you'll probably want to explore the new Zotero beta with PDF annotator/reference extraction instead.
  • army-jag341
    I think that is the version I have... Is there a way to grab a PDF with annotations and extract them into Zotero? More than one?
  • dstillman
    Yes, you can drag individual annotations into a note or create a note from all of a PDF's annotations from the notes pane in the PDF reader. You can also create a note from annotations by right-clicking on the parent item in the items list.

    This works on both native Zotero annotations and annotations embedded in the PDF. (I think for the items-list option with embedded annotations you currently need to have opened the PDF once.)
  • army-jag341
    Thank you @dstillman ... Quick follow up: As each PDF has its respective citation in Zotero, but annotations were not done by clicking on the file attached to the citation, but outside that environment, then:
    - can I drag the annotated PDF file into Zotero and the system would recognize the annotations?
    - would I have to instead physically add the annotated file to each of the citations for Zotero to recognize the annotations?
    Thank you so much for your help.
  • dstillman
    The PDF file with embedded annotations would have to be in Zotero. Whether the files you annotated externally were the same files you had in Zotero or other files you had on your computer would be something you would know.
  • army-jag341
    I see. Would dragging a dropping them add them to their respective existing citations, or would this create a new citation entry?
Sign In or Register to comment.