PDF searchability

Anisa Puri · February 10, 2013

Hi,

I've enabled PDF indexing in preferences - but am unsure about how to actually search across pdfs. Can anyone help?

Thanks!

adamsmith · February 10, 2013

If you search in the quick search bar (i.e. the search field between then magnifying glass and the green arrow) set to "Everywhere" the search includes PDF full text.
If you only want to search in attachments use advanced search:
Attachment content --> Contains --> <your search term>

Anisa Puri · February 10, 2013

It doesn't seem to be working. Does this happen if pdf indexing is enabled after the pdfs have been uploaded?

adamsmith · February 10, 2013

I believe so, yes. You can trigger re-indexing in the "Search" tab of the Zotero Preferences.

Anisa Puri · February 10, 2013

Thanks! It still says 47 are unindexed despite having re-indexed. How do I fix this? And the advanced search doesn't seem to work - I don't seem able to specially search my notes etc.

adamsmith · February 10, 2013

you need to be more specific about what in the advanced search doesn't work.
As for the PDFs - one thing is that not all PDFs _can_ be indexed. Find one that should be indexed and see if you can manually index it by clicking on the round green arrow next to indexed: No

Anisa Puri · February 11, 2013

Is there a way to index the pdfs that aren't indexed, if they still say 'No' after I've attempted to manually index them?

None of the searches I've tried in the advanced search has yielded any results. For instance, if I select 'Note' and search for a word that I know is in several notes - no results come up. Same if I search by any other method (Date added/Title etc). This is regardless of whether I select Search subcollections and Include Parent and Child Items. Have I overlooked something?

Thanks so much!

adamsmith · February 11, 2013

No, if they don't index manually either they don't have any OCRd text (note that Zotero doesn't do OCR, it requires text to be machine-readable in the PDF) or that pdftotext, the tool that Zotero uses for indexing, won't read them for another reason.

Re advanced search - does the quick search bar work?
Start by searching for a piece of a title in quick search set to title, creator, year.
If you find something, perform an advanced search for
Title --> Contains --> <exactly the same string>
If that doesn't work provide an error report ID right afterwards:
http://www.zotero.org/support/reporting_bugs#provide_a_report_id

adamsmith · February 11, 2013

(and just to be clear "Title" "Note" etc. refers to those fields in Zotero, i.e. Zotero Notes and titles of items as you see them in the info tab in the right hand panel. They don't refer to titles of PDFs or notes taken in PDFs.