searchable PDF - individual batches

HenryE7
Hello all
Does Zotero read individual searchable PDFs or do I have to apply catch-words?

I have a research project going over many years and would like to scan the lot to make it available to others?

I am new to this and think Zotero is a very good option to store my searchable PDFs

Thanking you in advance
  • dstillman
    I'm not sure what you mean by "catch-words".

    Zotero automatically indexes PDFs and allows you to search them.

    https://www.zotero.org/support/searching#pdf_full-text_indexing
  • HenryE7
    I apologise for not being prec

    What I am hoping to learn is : can it be possible to search the text of “text searchable PDF’s contained in Zotero?

    Thanking you for assistance
  • dstillman
    I still don’t know what you mean by that. As I say, you can search for PDFs in your library based on the text in them. If you mean something else, you’ll need to say more.
  • HenryE7
    Thank you so much for more input to help me explain my query !
    To be more precise :
    1. I plan to create searchable PDFs using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software so they are searchable for phrases and words
    2. Can I store multiple PDFs like that in my Zotero library?
    3. From the first searchable PDF onwards, do I need to paginate them (eg PDF #1 starts from page 1 - page 40, and PDF#2 starts from page 41 - page 91 etc) - so that when searching a page number is linked to each 'hit' ?
    4. Can I then search for text and phrases (eg 'branch pruning') over the entirety of the individual PDFs contained within Zotero?
    5. If the PDFs are paginated (per #3 above), would the search results be collated into a single list (in Word?) that shows page numbers from the multiple PDFs, or collated into multiple lists that shows page numbers from each of the PDFs --- or how?
  • adamsmith
    The answers to 2 and 4 are yes, but note that Zotero doesn't actually show you the specific search hits -- it just shows you which files contain a given phrase -- so pagination doesn't come into this at all 3 and 5 aren't relevant.

    There are plans to show search results in context in the medium-term, but I don't think these are advanced enough to say anything about pagination.
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