Zotera Beta App - PDF annotations missing

Nucharles
I am a new Zotero user and have been using the zotero beta app to read an article off and on over the course of two weeks. When I opened it up today, all my pdf annotations were gone :( Is there away to recover my annotations? It is a pretty dense article and am nervous to start over again if there is a risk that it might be lost
  • enozkan
    Did you open the article using the Zotero PDF Viewer? Zotero beta's PDF annotations are not embedded in the PDF, but stored in your database. If you open your PDF with another PDF viewer, they won't be there.

    If you want annotations to be embedded in the PDF so you, say, send it to a colleague with your notes, you can "Save As" to a new file.
  • dstillman
    For clarification, the PDF reader in the desktop app is available in the Zotero beta and needs to be turned on in the preferences.
  • transitlounge
    Haven't had any success displaying the pdf-viewer, even after turning the preference on and off repeatedly - on windows 10. Any ideas why this may be the case?
  • dstillman
    @transitlounge: Not sure what you mean there. If you enable the beta PDF reader in the General pane of the preferences and then try to open a PDF, it should definitely open in the built-in PDF reader in a tab.
  • transitlounge
    thanks for getting back to me so promptly - I'll give it a go. I was surprised that the icon in the centre pane wasn't available -as I see it here [https://www.zotero.org/support/pdf_reader_preview] - but I guess a pdf first needs to be opened. Apologies - novice status. I'm following some recipes that reference Zotfile for academic study and had presumed pdf's to be opened from the Base Directory ... but I feel like I'm missing a piece whereby the pdf gets associated with the bibliographic entry in Zotero (...does that last question make sense?).
  • dstillman
    edited August 23, 2021
    This is a bit too vague to give a specific answer on, so I'd recommend spending some time in the documentation to get a better sense of how Zotero works:

    https://www.zotero.org/support/quick_start_guide
    https://www.zotero.org/support/adding_items_to_zotero
    https://www.zotero.org/support/
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