Upgrade StorageCan I annotate my PDF snapshots?
Hello team,
I just found out that one can now annotate snapshots. That's a great function!
I also realized that I am able to take a snapshot of a PDF file. I can't, however, annotate the PDF file the way I can annotate the webpages. Any plans to be able to annotate PDFs that are opened within the browser? That would be very useful. Thanks!
I just found out that one can now annotate snapshots. That's a great function!
I also realized that I am able to take a snapshot of a PDF file. I can't, however, annotate the PDF file the way I can annotate the webpages. Any plans to be able to annotate PDFs that are opened within the browser? That would be very useful. Thanks!
See also:
<http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/772/pdf-annotations-import>;
<http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/656/>;
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/802/parsing-external-file-with-zotero-import-script/#Item_4
I will continue this work in a month once I've finished the paper I am currently writing. At least theoretically it is quite easy to extract the annotations from a pdf. The major problem right now is that you need Acrobat to annotate a pdf (or to enable annotation of a pdf in Adobe Reader).
A last note--PDFs can be quite big--they can be entire books, for instance. Imagine you are researching a particular subject, say Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. If you are analyzing a biography of MLK, you would want to make specific annotations, and notes, on specific sections of the book. It would not be much use to simply add the tag "I Have A Dream" to the entire book. You'd want to add that tag to the sections of the book that refer to the speech, and you'd want your zotero search to immediately land you at the places that you've tagged with "I Have a Dream" so that you could easily get to those sections. Once there, you'd want to see any annotations you'd made about that specific part of the book. Ie, "the author here is referring to the biblical underpinnings of King's narrative style, specifically his references to x, y, and z..." You'd want that annotation to appear when you did a search through zotero for "I have a dream" and "biblical". And you'd want to be able to make a citation in your word processor that cited the specific pages in the original text that you are referring to...
As for technical difficulties, cross-platform challenges, etc. As users, we'd like to ignore those challenges so that we can seamlessly collect, analyze and access information. That's what we hope software will do for us!
because this is something that the large open source community so far hasn't been able to come up with. As soon as it does, Zotero should (and I'd suspect will) use those (or that) tool(s) and integrate them.
It seems a much more useful approach to have Zotero do well what it does well and then "integrate" approaches from other projects - and allow users which project they pick (e.g. maybe I really want to work with Acrobat professional, whereas noksagt maybe wants to remain fully open-source and use okular or something along those line).
So basically if you want this to go forward, push the projects that work on better pdf editors.
Linking to pdf editors seems reasonable in the FAQs, that could certainly be done.
- full, responsive, tablet pc inking support
- hotkeys for highlighters of various colours
- heirarchical bookmarking
- drawing markups (i.e. polyline)
- pop-up notes
For what it's worth, zotero's own markup has a long way to go before it's ideal in posessing these features, and i currently convert html to pdf for annotation (and, it's geneerally good to have only ONE annotation interface, so that you learn it seamlessly regardless of wher eyou got your document from, so I convert everything to PDF and don't have to think much about my annotation system)
2) a larger point: I think PDF and PDF annotation is seriously overrated, I would certainly never follow the path of converting everything to PDF (but to be fair, I'm happy with using things like grep on HTML and text, and writing scripts to work with it).
3) As noksagt points out, it's also not entirely straightforward to program the sort of support people are asking for. I think it's way entirely unrealistic to expect Zotero to add this to Zotero itself. OTOH, if Mozilla were to add PDF support to Firefox, that might change.
However, it seems possible that Zotero might able to index the text within annotations (pop-ups notes) that have been made in external editors (like Acrobat), and that zotero be able to locate that text in searches. Is this also impossible? There seems to be some hope for that function being developed, according to this thread http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/7386/search-comments-in-pdfs/#Item_3
We'd seem to be waiting for developments to emerge in poppler, which will become a part of zotero? I think that's the point of noksagt's comment there. So, two questions: is that more or less an accurate understanding? and is there anything that can be done on the Zotero end of things to request that indexing of PDF annotations be worked on?
Thanks
In an ideal world, we would also support PDFs immediately, but the format is problematic for the licensing and platform reasons outlined above, and of course there are other tools available. Moreover, from the perspective of the research processes that Zotero seeks to enable, PDF annotation is not as high a priority as the annotation of text, image, audio, and video, all of which are more likely to be the types of "raw" research objects that we want users to be able to mark up and to expose to wider audiences. Right now there are accepted ways to point to a passage in a PDF by page number, etc., but those traditional methods are obviously inappropriate for images (X,Y?), audio(Z?), and video (X,Y, Z?).
If yes, this seems like mission-creep to me.
And as people do point out - there are tools out there for pdf, so it's not like there is no way to annotate pdfs.
I wonder if there is any news about the development of a revamped annotation interface? This was exciting news. Along these lines, I hope that PDFs would be included in the kinds of tools you're discussing, at least so that the compatibility with zotero would be quite high. Indeed, I wonder if it would be possible to use zotero keywords in combination with annotations-- perhaps use some sort of text symbol in front of the keyword (ie., #keyword1; #keyword2; etc)? It would be great to be able to use keywords to tag within pdfs (rather than to tag whole pdf documents), and to be able to search for text across all documents that meets with various tag criteria....
Thanks.
There is not a single open sourced program that can annotate pdfs in a useful way. Zotero developers used existing open source code for html annotation and the same would surely need to be done for pdfs. Don't blame Zotero, though. Blame Adobe.
The annotation thing seems to be going forward
http://mith.umd.edu/mith-receives-mellon-funding-for-open-annotation-collaboration/
but that sounds like a relatively long term project to me.
I may be missing something obvious here, but I'm using okular in Linux to annotate stuff and though the application itself is somewhat buggy at times, is there an overwhelming reason why it is impossible to use poppler for annotation in zotero? I noted another comment about poppler above but didn't see any response to it?
As far as I'm aware it's open source, the annotations are stored separately from the PDFs, etc.
EE
If you sign up for a free A.nnotate.com account and add the "shapshot" bookmarklet ("help" main menu item once you're logged in) , then clicking the bookmarklet will activate any links to PDFs within the page. Clicking those will fetch them to A.nnotate.com where you can add sticky notes to the text, highlight regions, draw arrows etc. Its pretty easy to do a neater integration if you run your own server, but, as people have pointed out, its not open source.
However, we do do other open source development, and we're not intrinsically against the idea for a.nnotate if we can be sure the developers still get paid somehow.