ZotFile: Annotations not being extracted

I'm not having much luck extracting annotations using ZotFile to notes in Zotero. I've tried both Preview and Skim (recommended on the ZotFile site) but neither seems to work.
  • Preview should work. Skim doesn't--the documentation is a bit confusing on this. It recommends Skim for viewing annotations, but it actually doesn't support annotations made in Skim (I believe Joscha annotates on his iPad).

    So focus on the former and start out with something simple, i.e. just one note and one piece of highlighted text. Does that work? If not, what exactly do you see?
  • OK, great news is that seems to now be working, but only when I manually click on 'Manage Attachments > Extract Annotations'. Two questions:
    1. Do you always have to manually extract the annotations?
    2. Is there a way to preserve a 'clean' copy (without annotation, say for printing) as well as an annotated copy?
    Thanks for the help.
  • You can automate 1 and achieve 2 by using the "send to tablet" function (which doesn't actually require any table, just a folder to which you push PDFs that you'll read and annotate.)
  • OK great but I'd still have to manually 'send to tablet' though right?
  • edited October 8, 2014
    Note that if you just want to print the document without annotations, most software offer a way to do so. You shouldn't need to save a separate copy for that.

    I'm a quite surprised that saving a PDF without comments is not a common feature though. Seems like Skim offers it and some other readers/editors might as well, but not Adobe.
  • Acrobat – at least the Pro version – lets you both print and safe a document without annotations. Not sure how many versions back this functionality goes, I'm inclined to think its there since at least version 8.
    Print: In the print options choose "document" (rather than "document and markup" or sth. similar, translating back from my non-English setup)
    Save: Save as "Optimized PDF" and tick the respectives boxes in the "Remove Userdata" section.
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