ZotDroid and ZotEZ2 sync PDF annotations

b0c5 · October 25, 2019

I setup Zotero to use WebDAV to sync attachments on pCloud.

If I open a pdf attachment via ZotEZ2 or ZotDroid on my mobile, and add some annotations (using Adobe Reader, say), will these annotations be synced back to the original file on pCloud?

dstillman · October 26, 2019

You'd have to ask the developers of those apps. If you annotate PDFs on your desktop such that the original file is modified, Zotero will sync the updated files to WebDAV.

b0c5 · October 28, 2019

So if I have Zotero on two desktops, using the same account and syncing to the same WebDAV location, I can annotate the PDFs safely on both computers and the changes will be synced together?

Just wanted to ask before trying this because I don't want to get into a corrupted state. Thanks.

dstillman · October 28, 2019

Yes. That's the point of file syncing. You'll just want to make sure you don't have the PDF open on multiple computers while syncing. (On Windows you'll generally get a sync error if Zotero tries to download a file that's open locally. On macOS and Linux it would just overwrite the underlying file, which might do unpredictable things if the file is open in a local PDF reader.)

b0c5 · October 31, 2019

Any developers of ZotEZ2 active on this forum? I would like to know if annotations made on the Android app sync back to the server.

Pettigrew · November 25, 2019

The ZotEZ2 developer hasn't been active on the forum for a while. You can try emailing him. Zotez2 downloads pdfs to the tablet and they are saved there, which does allow you to access them when you're offline, and annotations will be saved to those versions. But they do not sync back to the cloud. If you have made annotations to pdfs on your pc since first downloading them to ZotEZ2, and you would like to see the new annotated version through zotez2, you will need to go into settings and "delete local pdfs," and re-download them. When I first started with pcloud, in addition to using it as cloud storage for my Zotero library, I also tried saving pdfs in a separate folder to open, read, and annotate them on my tablet, and then upload them later as attachments to zotero back on my pc. At the time (about a year ago) pcloud also did not save the annotations. I remember going through this with their customer support, and realizing that I needed to keep using Dropbox for this. Thinking the problem with zotez2 might actually be pcloud not syncing the annotations, I purchased storage through zotero (a little bit pricey for graduate students). But still the annotations made through zotez2 do not upload back to the cloud. This is one of the basic functions an app like Zotdroid or zotez2 should provide. Otherwise the whole system is still a bit of a dinosaur. So we are waiting for the update. Note that zotfile apparently does save annotations to pdfs and according to another user here, it works through pcloud. I haven't tried it yet.