A PDF with OCR outside is a PDF with NO OCR inside Zotero

AlexBauert
1. I got a PDF from Uni Zurich, scanned for me. It is possible to make coloured marks with preview.app. When it is inside Zotero and opened there, it is like a grafic document.

what can I do to use it normally?

2. PDF with coloured marks inside Zotero that is exported, contains no such marks. How can I save them?

3. If I change from Zotero to Endnote, will I loose all marks and comments in my pdf?
  • dstillman
    By "coloured marks" do you mean highlights?

    Send the PDF to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread and we can take a look.

    For opening a PDF with Zotero annotations externally, it depends exactly how you're doing it. If you export with annotations, Zotero will write annotations to the saved file. If you just use Show File and open externally, you won't see Zotero annotations. Explained in Annotations in Database.
  • aborel
    edited 11 days ago
    Apple's Preview app (in recent enough MacOS version) performs on-the-fly OCR on PDFs that have no text layer, without saving the recognized text. In such cases, it is normal that other applications only see an image layer.
    You can use the Zotero-OCR plugin https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/zotero-ocr to add a text layer, or any other OCR tool.
  • dstillman
    @aborel: Ah, right, thanks.
  • AlexBauert
    Nice to give such comments with ideas how solve the problem.

    BUT: I have absolutly no idea how to install this plugin. I tried. I arrive at the point that I have to choose a plugin, but when i open the folder there is NOT ONE DOC I can choose. Surley my stupidity that is the problem. So, for me, this is of no value.

    Anybody has an idea how to solve the problem?
    many pdf in zotero, which I can not export with the «highlightning» (coloured marks), should be transferred into pdf that can exported with this and comments. For example to endnote.
  • aborel
    It isn't clear to me where you are stuck regarding the Zotero-OCR plugin. Can you say exactly how far you got in the instructions on https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/zotero-ocr ? Prerequisites section? Installation section? Feel free to give us as many details as possible so that we can help you (and maybe improve the documentation).
  • AlexBauert
    Wow - this should be a text that explains something? I don't get anything out of it. I'm not asking for support to become an expert. I want to solve a problem.
    I have no idea, what to do when I see this website:
    https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/zotero-ocr
    It looks like some experts / nerds did have a party and filled all their knowledge in and supposed everybody to understand everything. I'm not one of this «everybody».

    If you want to help: Make a descrpition, what (the hell) I have to do, where do I have to klick on to geht this plugin. Thx if you deliver such an instruction, if not ... your plugin is just in the virtual nirvana for me.
  • dstillman
    It sounds like this plugin isn't for you then. Many non-experts use it without a problem.

    You can find technical people you know (IT department, etc.) to help you set it up, or you can use any other OCR software to add text layers to your image-only PDFs.

    What you can't do is respond in this obnoxious, entitled way to people graciously trying to help you. Closing this thread.
This discussion has been closed.