Extracting annotations from pdf

vaibhavchadha
Hi I am new to Zotero. I tried highlighting some pdfs and then used zotero to extract annotations. Zotero is unable to do that and the message I get is they are top level items, snapshots or file does not exist. Can you please guide me where I am going wrong. I usually use it for annotating pdfs downloaded from internet instead of scholarly articles. Please guide.
  • bwiernik
    Install the Zotfile plugin. Annotation extraction is a feature of Zotfile.
  • vaibhavchadha
    I installed the Zotfile plugin and this message is appearing after that. If the article is from a scholarly source it works but if the pdf is like a stock market research report I get the above error.
  • bwiernik
    What message?
  • vaibhavchadha
    The message is top level items, snapshots or file does not exist.
  • bwiernik
    You need to create a parent item for the attachment file. https://www.zotero.org/support/retrieve_pdf_metadata

    If you don’t get a result for non-academic PDFs, right click on them and choose Create Parent Item and fill in the details manually.
  • vaibhavchadha
    Thanks very kind of you. It’s late in my timezone. I will check this out tomorrow. Regards
  • vaibhavchadha
    Hi Bwiernik. It is working. Thank you. One more question. When I drag pdf file to zotero and right click to open it, it opens outsize zotero in acrobat itself. Then I make highlights and while closing I choose the option of saving it in the default download folder of Zotero. This way the annotations and highlights work fine in zotero. Is this the right workflow? Is there a way to open the pdf in zotero itself, make highlights without actually needing to save the file everytime as per my above workflow?
  • bwiernik
    When you open the file from Zotero and edit it, save it in whatever directory it currently is in, not any new folder. If you are using Zotero’s default setup, it will be in a folder with a random name inside your Zotero data directory. Don’t worry about that and let Zotero handle it.
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