highlighting did not sync but articles and comments did?

tchappel
I have just recently downloaded zotero to my work computer - my articles showed up in their folders but all the highlighting I did at home is gone! I can still see comment bubbles that I entered but no highlighting...please help!
  • Gracile
    http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/22330/highlight-text-on-webpages-before-saving-to-zotero/#Item_2
    Highlighting itself in Zotero is no longer supported, and we don't recommend using highlighting or annotations. (Neither have ever synced with the server, for example.)
    http://www.zotero.org/support/screencast_tutorials/annotation
  • andrechappel
    Thank you for referencing this thread, but this is bizarre. Why wouldn't highlights be recommended when this is a perfectly normal method of summarizing the important points of an article for future reference? Zotero should definitely correct this shortcoming in their program's synching capabilities. No question.
  • adamsmith
    there's nothing "bizarre" about it, it's simply a question of feasability. The problem is with the annotation tool and not with the syncing. If Zotero is going to support syncing webpage/snapshot annotations it will be with a different tool, and that's why using this is no longer recommended and hasn't been for a while (I see it will actually be disabled for any snapshot that doesn't already have annotations in the next version of Zotero for that reason).
  • dstillman
    Why wouldn't highlights be recommended when this is a perfectly normal method of summarizing the important points of an article for future reference?
    In the quote above, I was referring specifically to the no-longer-supported functionality in Zotero, not highlighting and annotation in general.
  • andrechappel
    It sounds like the highlighting being discussed is for webpages or snapshots. Should the highlighting be synched for PDFs?
  • adamsmith
    yes. As long as it's written to the file (like most PDF annotators do) it should.
  • tchappel
    This is actually what my original post was about. I have one instance of Zotero setup on my home computer with highlighted pdfs. When I tried to create a new instance of Zotero at work and downloaded/synched my library, all of the references and pdfs were downloaded, but the pdfs did not have any of the highlights that exist in the pdfs in my home library. I'm using PDF-XChange viewer.
  • adamsmith
    edited March 19, 2013
    While it may happen that syncing doesn't _update_ a file when it's annotated, it's absolutely impossible that it somehow "strips" annotations from a file when you first sync it. That would require Zotero's sync to modify the file, which it doesn't do - in fact it cannot possibly do that.

    There is something else going on and it's likely unrelated to Zotero sync. More likely has something to do with your pdfXchange settings.
  • bryony moore
    Sorry if I'm going over old ground here, but can I just check:
    - Zotero does not now support highlighting?
    -And if I wanted to offer this functionality to members of a Zotero Group, each group member would have to install a separate highlighting application on their computer?
    Sorry again if this has already been answered above - I'm a newbie to this and it's all still slightly mind-boggling!
    Thanks,
  • adamsmith
    both of those are correct, yes. For webpages this would actually be a bit tricky, I'm not a aware of a good highlighting tool that would work with Zotero's sync.
    For PDFs, Zotero doesn't have a PDF reader at all, so it doesn't interact with PDFs other than to pass them on to the viewer you have specified in Firefox or your operating system. Fortunately, PDF annotations are relatively standardized, though, so different users can rely on different PDF for annotating (e.g. Foxit, pdfXchange, Adobe Acrobat, Okular, Mac Preview) and still see each other's annotations.
  • bryony moore
    Aha - very useful, thanks very much!
  • Hans_Michalec
    I'm still missing the marker feature for highlighting text on locally saved webpages (no syncing needed) and, yes, I still do not understand why you killed it.

    As I really need this feature I wonder if it would help to go back to an older version of Zotero (I even don't care if I can not still read newer entries in Zotero). Is this possible and if so, which Zotero version should/can I take?
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