Highlighting some PDFs makes text vanish

scribbler
Maybe this is a bug. In some PDFs when I highlight text and save, a page or two of the text vanishes and I am left only with blocks of yellow. Googling led me to what seems like a workaround: if I right-click the PDF in Zotero and choose Manage Attachments to send it to another folder, I can see all text (including that which is highlighted). I think I might have raised this some time ago but I can find no evidence of it, so perhaps I imagined having done so. I can provide screenshots demonstrating the issue if that would help anyone. Thx.
  • dstillman
    if I right-click the PDF in Zotero and choose Manage Attachments to send it to another folder, I can see all text (including that which is highlighted)
    That just deletes highlights — ZotFile hasn't been updated since the PDF reader came out and doesn't know anything about annotations — so that's not exactly workaround. I assume you can also just delete the highlights in the PDF reader.
    I can provide screenshots demonstrating the issue if that would help anyone.
    Yes, can you take some screenshots, upload them somewhere (e.g., Dropbox or Google Drive), and provide a link here? And can you also email the PDF (right-click → Show File) to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread?
  • scribbler
    Holy cow, when I clicked "show file" and attempted to preview (I'm on a Mac, so this is just space bar for quick look), I got an error message. Tried this again and file was back to normal--all text present and accounted for! Writing a book is stressful but I swear the phenomenon I described earlier was real. Perhaps my system logged out or restarted overnight and that somehow resolved it. Or perhaps "show file" played a role. For the record, I believe I have been using Mac's Preview to look at and annotate PDFs stored in Zotero. When the text was missing I tried deleting highlight and nothing happened. I had a similar missing text experience with another PDF but can't recall which.
  • dstillman
    Oh, if you're talking about annotations you made in Preview, that doesn't have anything to do with Zotero. I thought you were talking about annotations made with the new PDF reader in the Zotero beta.
  • scribbler
    Ha, it never crossed my mind that the problem was with Preview, sorry to blame Zotero.
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