Zotfile Citation Pages

Hi all,

when extracting annotations with Zotfile a lot of the times the wrong page numbers are extracted. E.g: (Kuckartz 2014:79), while the connected Text actually should be (Kuckartz 2014: 60).
This is due to unnumbered pages at the begining of papers/books. However my pdf-reader (foxit) actually displays the correct page information.

Is there any way to fix this? I could not find any clue on the formus.
Thanks in advance!
  • IMHO you should use the numbering that appears in the print, i.e. ignore the unnumbered pages (unless the book starts from page e.g. 5, which I have not seen).
  • Is there a way to set up Zotfile to do this? Because this is exactly what it is not doing.
  • Currently, this is a limitation of Zotfile, as explained in the preferences: "Tools" -> "ZotFile Preferences" -> "Advanced Settings":

    "Use actual article/book chapter page for highlighted text snippets": "The article page number is determined by adding the page in the pdf document and the starting page from the 'pages' field in the zotero metadata. This approach fails if the first page in the pdf document is not the first page in the article/book chapter"

    Here's a related issue on github:
    https://github.com/jlegewie/zotfile/issues/190
  • Am I correct that because books have no page number field in Zotero, there is no workaround for this?

    I would assume that the easiest thing to do from a user's perspective would be to assign negative page values to the frontmatter, i.e., if there's a 250pg book with an intro numbered i-xii, the page range for the whole book would be "-12-250." But I suppose that's hard to implement, not least because of the need to parse the minus before the first page number?
  • @nathan.hopson: Yes, ZotFile's "Use actual article/book chapter page" is using the "Pages" field, so these offsets won't work for books. (You can find more technical details here.)

    I would recommend trying the Zotero beta, which supports the extraction of page labels:
    https://www.zotero.org/support/pdf_reader_preview.
  • Thanks @qqbb, I'll check that out.

    * For anyone else considering this, do note the prominent warning on the beta download page that it might corrupt or delete your database.
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