@daeh I would love to be able to transfer my Papers library without losing at least some of the organisation associated with it but unfortunately I don't know anything about coding but. I have looked at your script but wouldn't even know where to begin! Do you think it's a complete pipe dream to think I could use your code without any basic knowledge of coding? Where would I begin and how much time would it take? Or should I just accept that I will only be able to transfer the basic info from my Papers library?

Hello,

I am using Daeh's GitHub code to try to convert my Paper3 library to Zotero. I've had Papers since version 1 (when it was just "papers", and it didn't suck), so my directory contains many old files.

I can't find the directory labelled "Library.papers3", but I now realize that this is the directory "Papers Library". So, I disabled the line that checks for the .paper3 extension, and had the program look at /Documents/Papers Library/

The next error is "AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'group'" when reading through the Bibtex file. It seems that the re.search file doesn't handle non-Latin characters properly, and some of my records contain weird characters. I wasn't able to make the code resistant to this, so I simply removed records from the bibtex file until it ran until the end. I've saved these records, so I can add these back after the inport.

Here's an example of a deleted record, in case anyone is able to 'code around this' and commit to GitHub.

@article{J:1998va,
author = {Stohr J, Joachim and Padmore, Howard and Anders, S and Stammler, T and Scheinfein, MR},
title = {{PRINCIPLES OF X-RAY MAGNETIC DICHROISM SPECTROMICROSCOPY}},
journal = {Surf. Rev. Let.},
year = {1998},
volume = {5},
pages = {1297--1308},
rating = {0},
date-added = {2009-04-28T23:02:42GMT},
date-modified = {2017-04-23T02:32:03GMT},
url = {http://www.google.ca/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=Joachim+Stohr,J.,+Howard+Padmore,+S+Anders,+T+Stammler,+M.R+Scheinfein&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&redir_esc=&ei=xhv9TLDcGIbmsQPIjJX3DQ},
local-url = {file://localhost/Users/urquhart/Documents/Papers%20Library/1998/StohrJ./Surf.%20Rev.%20Let.%201998%20StohrJ.pdf},
file = {{Surf. Rev. Let. 1998 StohrJ.pdf:/Users/urquhart/Documents/Papers Library/1998/StohrJ./Surf. Rev. Let. 1998 StohrJ.pdf:application/pdf}},
uri = {\url{papers3://publication/uuid/F8B4E327-01A9-4DFA-B94E-A77F98E190BE}}
}

Hello
1) I have also a problem to move from papers3 to Zotero : in my case, I don't have a lot of collections so I can reconstruct them "by hand" but I am interested in recovering my annotations and highlights because I use them a lot and have plenty of annotated papers for my research. Could you please tell me how to do this. I am new in Zotero so I know almost nothing, sorry.
I have another question : 2) to annotate I use a lot my iPad. If I understood well, I can use zotfile to synchronise my papers this way and recover the annotations I make. But I did not really understand the workflow for this. Can I use any annotation app for this ? how do I "record" the annotations then ? ... It is all unclear for me. Maybe I just have to read more the zotfile help. (I confess I have not yet, since I am for the moment more preoccupied by the first problem).

Thank you in advance for any help you will be able to give me.
M.

Hello M.
I can't help with the annotations / highlights from Papers. From an early stage I was a bit suspicious of Papers (and lock-in) and decided to do most highlighting using a regular PDF reader program. I believe there is a way to export the PDFs with embedded notes from Papers, but that may be too much work to be useful (i.e. to do one by one, manually).

(As you probably know already - at least the normal notes from papers do get transferred when you use the XML (endnote) format for switching to Zotero)