Export of Annotations Made with Adobe Acrobat do not Render Properly

-william-

FIRST ISSUE

Exporting a Note to "Markdown & Include Links" containing annotations made with Adobe Acrobat does not render the annotations properly. The output appears just like the following examples ("[soft return]" indicates a soft return was randomly made at that location):

-– “a common legislative code will apply to all authorities” (Ryan, 1991, p. 3) (pdf) a common legislative code will
apply to all [soft return]
authorities

-– “archaic terminology and confusing variations between different laws applying to different types of authorities will be removed” (Ryan, 1991, p. 3) (pdf) archaic terminology and confusing [soft return]
variations [soft return]
between different laws applying to different types of authorities [soft return]
will be removed

Of course, I can manually delete the duplicates after the (pdf) link in the Note before exporting it, but that is not efficient.

SECOND ISSUE

Note that the 'zotero://select' links (Ryan, 1991, p.3) for the two different annotations reference the same page 3. The first link references the correct page. The second link and every following link to different annotations incorrectly references page 3, when the annotations are actually contained on subsequent pages and and should be, e.g., p.5, p.8, p.9, p.14….

Can these issues which occur repeatedly in this workflow be fixed?

Interestingly, this does not happen using Zotero PDF Viewer, but I can't always read and work with PDFs in the Viewer.

-william-

I think I found the answer to fixing the First Issue:
in the Config Editor, noteTemplates preference: extensions.zotero.annotations.noteTemplates.highlight < p>{{highlight quotes='true'}} {{citation}} {{comment}}< /p>, I modified the Value by removing the {{comment}} placeholder. No more duplicates.

dstillman

No, don't do that. You have Acrobat set to extract highlighted text into comments, where your own comments should go. Zotero extracts highlighted text properly, so you can just turn that Acrobat feature off. You should reset that the note template so that you can actually use comments and have them appear in the notes.

For the second issue, can you share the PDF in question with support@zotero.org with a link to this thread?

dstillman

(Note that all non-private information needs to be posted here, not sent via email — this is where all support happens. The email address is just for sending private files.)

In looking at the output file again, all references to pg. 4 are on the same page of the pdf, but the reference should be p. 537, not p. 4, to follow the previous link to p. 536.

When a PDF doesn't specify a page label, Zotero tries to detect it on the PDF page. It looks like that's working for most of these pages but not all. We'll look into why it didn't detect some of them.

To fix these, you can either set the page labels in Acrobat (you'd have to look up how) or import the annotations into Zotero from the File menu of the PDF reader, which will remove them from the PDF file and allow you to edit them in Zotero, including the page labels.

I don’t understand what Acrobat feature to "turn off.”

No idea — you'd have to look up what the setting is called in Acrobat. I'm just explaining that the reason you're seeing duplicate highlight text is because Acrobat, not Zotero, is putting the highlight text into the comments, and Zotero is dutifully importing those comments, while also parsing and displaying the highlighted text itself.

Also, will you tell me if that will adversely affect my Acrobat annotations?

Not sure exactly what you mean by that. Again, Acrobat is just parsing the highlighted text and copying it to the comment field, which is usually used for user-created comments. Whether that makes sense for other workflows of yours with other programs is up to you. It doesn't make sense in Zotero, which parses the highlight text itself (and makes it editable) and also imports comments, which it expects to be comments you added yourself.