Upgrade StorageZotFile - Advanced PDF management for Zotero
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Still, I would appreciate if anyone can answer my poppler question ...
@dstillman This comes up a lot. If any headway can be made on switching the extension for Zotero plugins, that would be amazing.
I'm on windows 10, so using pdf.js. Any help appreciated; if I can usefully provide further info, just ask.
I want to use ZotFile to rename tens of thousands of papers into the following format:
year_issue_pages, which works great with {%y_}{%v_}{%f}.
YET,
I need pages to consist of 4 digits, i.e. 0001-0004 and not 1-4.
Is there any possibility to create that format?
Kind regards,
Yves
There's no criticism implied here - obviously they are entitled to not spend their time on it! But a lot of people rely on it, and bits of it are currently broken. So... are others working on it? Is there a prospect of anybody else taking it up?
(Yes, I realise the probable answer is "if you've volunteering....". No, I don't have the skills. I would contribute to a group effort to employ somebody, if that were viable...)
[1] https://github.com/jlegewie/zotfile/issues/350#issuecomment-381322477
I'm not aware of anything in ZotFile that's currently reliably broken. E.g. I just tested extracting highlights on Windows 10 using Acrobat and that works just fine. I'd try with different annotation software.
@swaldman Just to give an example. You write "in the current versions of Zotero and Zotfile, 'Extract annotations' only pulls in text box annotations, and not highlights". If this would be a general problem, I would look into it pretty quickly. I rely on this functionality almost every day. But it's not a general problem. It works for me, it works for @adamsmith. I can't even reproduce it. Maybe you are doing something wrong (e.g. maybe you are using the "Pen" annotation tool and not "highlight"), maybe it's related to your specific set-up, maybe you have something else installed that interferes. That is what I mean when I say "I am not going to chase down possible bugs".
Hope that clarifies my position.
Re my specific problem (in case anybody else can help - I respect your position here): Yes, highlights made in Acrobat work. Highlights made in EzPDF, an Android app, do not work. They used to work - so I don't know whether something has changed in Zotfile/pdf.js, or whether something has changed in EzPDF. Weirdly, if I open the files in Acrobat, the highlights show up as perfectly normal highlights - so presumably they must follow the standard - yet they still don't get imported by Zotfile.
Hence I'm scratching my head.
Any insight from those who understand more than me about PDF annotation would be appreciated!
I discovered Zotfil three month ago, and it's a fantastic tools for me, but I have the same problem.
When I used Prewiew : "Extract annotations" only pulled the highlights but not the annotations. Sometimes, my annotations were incomplete, sometimes they were erase and zotefile modified the PDF itself, in the same proportion, so I lost a part of my annotations.
Now, I use Acrobat Reader. "Extract annotations" seems now to work with the annotations (I am not complete sure). However, I have a problem with the highlights, because it doesn't work correctly. When I use it with "normal" pdf, it's seems to work, but when I want to use it with big pdf like 200 pages e.g (it's why Zotefile can be very helpful for me!) the highlights texts are replace by symbols (like those : " ")
N.B : Sorry if my English is not very clear.
Zotfile doesn't edit PDFs at all, so it would not have caused you to lose any part of your annotations—that would be an issue to investigate with your PDF editor.
Regarding the highlights being extracted as symbols, are you able to copy-and-paste the text out correctly manually? If so, can you upload the PDF to Dropbox or similar and post a public link here?
No, Zotfile doesn't edit the PDF itself, but he edit the comments you have wrote. I know it shouldn't make this to that, but it does it.
I'm not sure I understood. You want me I copy the file generated by Zotefile or the original PDF?
Both of those files (with labels describing each and a description of the exact steps you followed to go from one to the other) would be helpful.
Just for the information: I'm using Moon+ Reader for Android and all the highlights (and notes) are extracted by ZotFile without any problems.
Incidentally it's not as straightforward as "this app always causes trouble". I tried to reproduce with a sample one-line Word document -> PDF -> EzPDF -> Zotfile, and it worked fine... but it doesn't work with (most?) papers.
Kinda baffled at the moment, especially as the highlights show up just fine in Firefox, which AIUI also uses PDF.js...
The Preference name would probably be:
extensions.zotfile.pdfExtraction.tag
I am just asking in case I overlooked something.
– The moving and renaming of attachments needs to be triggered (either via right-click of the pop-up) – there's no way to do that automatically, right?
– Same with parsing the annotations. Always needs to be triggered, no automation, right?
What's the best practice for people that all their attachments to be stored in a Dropbox or similar folder?
A.) Let Zotero store them directly in dropbox folder, despite of the warning that this may damage the database.
B.) Let Zotfile move the files to Dropbox folder and link back.
C.) Something different?
A.) Those warnings are for a reason. Storing your entire Zotero folder in Dropbox is highly *not* recommended.
B.) If the attachments are added to parent items as "links", then it is safe to store the attachments in Dropbox (or any other cloud sync system).
@adamsmith What is the recommendation for users wanting to keep only Zotero's "storage" folder in Dropbox? Is that even possible?
http://zotero.org/support/sync#alternative_syncing_solutions
@ckatzenbach I would recommend using Zotfile to store your PDFs in Dropbox and manage their locations. That is by far the easiest way to use Zotero with Dropbox. By default, Zotfile will move and rename new attachment files when you add them to Zotero (at least when using the Zotero Browser Connector). If you use Zotfile's Send to Tablet function, you can have annotations automatically extracted when you pull them back from the tablet, but otherwise you need to trigger extraction automatically.
Thanks for the pointer with the Firefox Connector. Right, here renaming and moving works automatically. Not with adding files via drag and drop, though.