Zotero 7 reader: Export snapshots as PDFs

  • LacarAtPano
    Can someone tell me, when you open a snapshot in Zotero PDF reader, can you quickly export it as a PDF? Like, does it open it as a PDF then or still as an html?

    Also any chance that now when you select items with snapshots and do Export PDFs it will pick up snapshots as PDFs?

    Basically, I'm hoping for a very quick way to get snapshots from a collection into a file folder as PDFs.
  • adamsmith
    @LacarAtPano not possible and I don't think it will be, at least not without an add on. Zotero devs feel ( correctly imo) that converting web pages to PDF is a bad idea
  • LacarAtPano
    Well, I've been printing web pages to PDF for a long time, and it's the standard practice of my organization as we need a copy of the web page as it appeared when it was used as a source and our standard is to capture everything that goes in that record in PDF for compiling to the records we are required to keep. I kind of resent the Zotero devs passing moral judgement on the practice of saving web pages as PDFs for record keeping and just withholding the function. We are still going to do it, but it will just be one or two more steps, I supposed. Maybe a third-party add-on will allow us to sin in this manner with more convenience.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    @LacarAtPano: Let's skip the hyperbole.

    1) Our stance on converting webpages to PDFs is a technical and user-experience judgment, not a moral one. We make choices every single day about how Zotero should work. If you disagree with one of those choices, modify the open-source code, use a plugin that does what you want, or use something else.

    2) Your entire question here doesn't even make sense. Our previous statements about converting webpages to PDFs were in the context of not having snapshot-annotation support in the reader. Now that we do, that's obviously not going to make us more likely to support converting snapshots to PDFs within the app — annotating webpages directly, with all the benefits of HTML, is…the entire point of the feature?

    3) We're not "withholding" anything. We haven't chosen to take time from other development to implement some complex feature that we don't think makes sense, but that has no bearing on your ability to generate PDFs from snapshots. You can just open either the URL or the snapshot (right-click → Show File) in your browser and print to PDF from there.

    Printing is currently broken in the updated reader, but once that's fixed, you should be able to print snapshots to PDF from there, just like you can in any program on your computer. But it might not work as well as in the browser, since some browsers try to optimize what is inherently a lossy, imprecise conversion.
  • LacarAtPano
    Okay, so there will be a way to at print the snapshot to PDF right from Zotero. That will work fine but not really better than opening the snapshot in a browser and then printing it to PDF.

    I don't need to view the PDFs in a browser at all. I just need to be able to capture web pages as PDFs as they are accessed for the purpose of creating a source record. It would be very good for my workflow if I could convert it right in the app into a child item PDF so that it would then be captured in File > Export PDFs when I select a group of items and do that. Having to open and print snapshot to PDF separately is just a workflow gap I was hoping could be closed with this new feature.

    So while I get that from your viewpoint annotating with web page within the app is the point of the feature, from my viewpoint, having a way to convert from snapshot to PDF within the app is what would actually help me and my team. So that's what I was asking if it would be possible.
  • danielborek
    edited August 24, 2023
    @LacarAtPano As someone who is trying to capture non-academic websites (outside Zotero) to PDF, there is no easy way to capture HTML to PDF that fit all pages and I am really on the side of the Dev team here

    However, until someone develop a plugin that will have a requested functionality you or someone from your team might try to convert html to PDFs write a simple script that will access the database, access the html files and register the output PDF to the source Zotero item, there some nice utlities in Python https://pypi.org/project/pyhtml2pdf/ and accessing Zotero with Python is here https://github.com/urschrei/pyzotero but such utilities will exist in other languages for sure


    Basically if you want just export your html files from the groups without adding the PDFs into a parent item should be quite easy, you just need to to get their Zotero IDs(the alphanumeric numbers) through API or even normal export (CSV should work), and then you need to loop over all this items and convert them to PDF with your tool of choice (this simple python module that I linked should work), if you dont program yourself ask a collegue, such script could be really quick to write


  • agam2222
    Hello
    Hope you are all well.
    Not against having an option to export html to pdf when needed from within Zotero or having the option to export both from zotero connector, but I re-emphasize the importance of the new update of having the ability to save webpages as snapshots and being able to annotate them as such. It is not only a matter of keeping the design of the page, but in other languages (such as Arabic), the pdfs does not allow proper handling of text (no proper extraction of text in annotations or what ever). The snapshot allows copying, annotating and several other processes more smoothly on many other languages.
    If it is possible to add the other new types of annotation (inking, inserting text....) to snapshots, this will be even better.
    Thanks again for all great updates and efforts
  • AbeJellinek Zotero Team
    We'd like to support inking / text annotations on snapshots, but they pose issues - mostly, webpages are inherently reflowable, so if you e.g. draw a circle around a line of text and then that line of text breaks into two lines on a smaller screen, how are we supposed to handle that?

    I don't know that there's a good answer.

    (Please report any issues with Arabic that you encounter in the snapshot reader!)
  • LacarAtPano
    "Printing is currently broken in the updated reader, but once that's fixed, you should be able to print snapshots to PDF from there, just like you can in any program on your computer."

    I've been waiting for the ability to print snapshots but so far it's still not working. I did check for updates. Is it still not working or should I try re-installing?
  • sjgknight
    edited November 4, 2024
    Another case where (some version of) convert to PDF might be useful is in exporting libraries/collections including the snapshots and their annotations. At the moment my understanding is that this isn't possible (https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/115743/save-as-export-function-for-the-website-snapshot), but that may mean users annotate snapshots thinking they'll get equivalent portability (possibly I'm distinctively silly in falling into that assumption :)). I appreciate the technical challenge, and don't have any views on method that won't raise further issues.
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