Proquest translator errors

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  • adamsmith
    Aurimas has repaired the issue with non-English proquest GUI versions in a rather heroic effort. You can wait for 24hs for the translator to auto-update, or you can update immediately from the General tab of the Zotero preferences.
  • dipahart
    Can you help explain blocking pop ups? If I allow them in firefox preferences, I can download from ABI/Proquest. But without it, I can't.
    Thanks.
  • adamsmith
    that shouldn't be the case. Do you have a sample URL?
  • dipahart
    adam, I reinstalled a bunch of stuff so it's better now. If it catches again, I'll be back. I use noscript which sometimes caused issues with zotero.
  • timsweys
    I have read other users referring to the problem of importing PDFs from Proquest, but i cannot seem to find an answer.

    I am trying to import hundreds of articles from historic news archives through Proquest, both the citations and the actual content. I no longer encounter problems importing the citations into zotero (per hundred) but progress on the pdf front (only snapshots) is lacking. Is there any fix for this? (today I have upgraded my both my zotero and firefox and went through all the steps outlined upthread but alas to no avail) Thanks!
  • adamsmith
    could we have a URL for an individual item that fails to download the PDF? IIRC Proquest provides a permalink on the page, that would be ideal.
    (Generally, PDF download from Proquest is finicky, so there is a good chance this is a translator problem).
  • timsweys
    http://search.proquest.com.library3.webster.edu/docview/861967270/139A5E87E999D2EA19/101?accountid=14944
  • adamsmith
    I don't see a PDF on proquest for that article ("The Pakistan Ultimatum") - the full text is just on the page.
    Can you get to a PDF of that article? URL?
    Zotero will never create PDFs, it will only download them where they're provided by the database.
  • timsweys
    Thanks for your help. The thing is, if I manually select the export PDF manually within proquest and select full text export (amongst others) it does export a PDF. However, it would take weeks if I would do that manually (and I have read that the automatic detection function of zotero doesn't work that well as of yet). Any suggestions as to how to circumvent this problem?
  • adamsmith
    edited October 8, 2012
    The first question is - why do you need the PDF? Zotero will save a snapshot of the page, which has the full text of the article.

    I see the PDF export option, I'm not sure it's possible to do that automatically with Zotero, but even if, it's not clear to me it's desirable. As opposed to PDFs of the actual newspaper (which Zotero does - or at least should - import for historical newspapers), I don't see any additional information being added by what is essentially a PDF printout of the html page.
    and I have read that the automatic detection function of zotero doesn't work that well as of yet
    not sure what you mean by this? If you just downloaded the PDF and used "Retrieve Metadata" in Zotero that absolutely would not work, and it most likely never will - that only works for academic publications.
    But you could still download the data from proquest and attach a PDF
  • timsweys
    Why PDFs? I'd like to run papermachines (https://github.com/chrisjr/papermachines) and it was my understanding that I need PDFs. I will ask Chris about this. Let me find out. Regardless, zotero only makes snapshots of the first article. So even if the snapshot option would work, I will also have to find out how to make snapshots of each article. Would you know how I could fix this?

    ad downloading the data and attaching the pdf manually: right, but that would take very very long if I have to do that for hundreds of articles.

    let me check with Papermachines and get back.

    Thanks.
  • adamsmith
    Regardless, zotero only makes snapshots of the first article.
    I don't follow? Zotero takes a snapshot of every article you import through proquest.

    I believe PaperMachine should work on html attachments, too, but do ask Chris about that.
    If not, it certainly should - the text is already indexable so it wouldn't be much trouble to implement and a lot of contemporary news sources - newspapers, magazines etc. - that can be imported into Zotero don't come as PDFs.
  • timsweys
    edited October 8, 2012
    I have asked Chris about this.

    I have updated my settings. My firefox currently keeps crashing if I only download 100 files simultaneously. If I download 4-6 articles, Zotero now imports snapshots and PDFs. However, the snapshot only provides a snapshot of the abstract (not the entire text) while zotero says if I double click the fulltext PDF: "the attached file could not be located". Is there anything you could suggest I should do?
  • adamsmith
    provide an error report ID for trying to open a PDF:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/reporting_bugs
    are you getting PDF import from ProQuest pages like the one above? I don't really see how that would happen...

    As for "However, the snapshot only provides a snapshot of the abstract (not the entire text)" - are you sure about that? I accessed the page you link to from two different institution and I have the full text of the article on the page.
    There are proquest pages that only provide abstracts and have the full text as PDF - but I need links to those that aren't working for you before I can say anything.
  • adamsmith
    and when you say "Firefox keeps crashing" does it actually shut down or does it just become unresponsive? If the latter, just wait.
  • aurimas
    I think Snapshots failing to attach is probably related to the discussion here. I fixed the translator to side-step this bug. It will now save snapshots for all items, but it is a bit slower. Don't be surprised if Firefox/Zotero is non-responsive for a bit if saving a large amount of items. I tried 20 and it froze up for maybe 10 seconds.
    However, the snapshot only provides a snapshot of the abstract (not the entire text) while zotero says if I double click the fulltext PDF: "the attached file could not be located". Is there anything you could suggest I should do?
    Zotero displays file attachments before they are actually downloaded. Particularly if you are importing a large number of files and/or try to access the file attachment too quickly after importing an item, you would see this error. If you let Zotero finish downloading the attachment, this error should go away. The next major Zotero release will have a better way of handling this, and it will be much more apparent when attachments are done downloading.

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