tags from annotations to pdf tags and reference tags

I just discovered that one can add a tag for each annotation that one adds to a pdf.
This is great and could be a really great workflow of annotating pdfs, tagging them with ones personal tag-ontology, and then being able to find the references based on these annotation tags.
I have also seen that an pdf linked to a ref can have tags that are different from the tags that a reference has.
I had thought that when adding tags to annotations in a pdf, that upon closing the pdf, these tags would be added to the tags of the pdf, but it seems not the case. I also haven't found an action to do this.
It also seems that when extracting the annotations from a pdf, that the tags from the annotations are not extracted, do neither appear in the tags list nor in the note itself.
And I have not found a way to get the tags from the annotations/pdf/notes into the tag list of the reference.

I can see that searching for a tag that only exists in an annotation, will actually turn up the reference, however there seems to be no indication (e.g. highlighting) in which subsection of the reference (note, pdf, annotation) the tag was actually found.

Also, it would be great to keep the tag ontology straight between the tags of the references, the pdfs and the annotations, by also showing the reference-tags in the list one sees in the pdf-tags and annotation-tags (but perhaps in a diff colour).
Anybody any thoughts about this ?

Happy festive season
Oliver



  • In an open PDF, annotation tags appear at the bottom of the left sidebar. Clicking on one will then show only that tag's annotations in the side bar, so you can easily navigate to them. If you want to add them to a note, first create a note, then select the ones you want, and then right-click Add to Note. But you are correct that the tags unfortunately do not appear in the note.

    When annotation tags were first released, I decided to prefix all my annotation tags with #. So I can distinguish between regular tags and annotation tags in the tag pane of the main library window. Which then allows me to find PDFs that have those tagged annotations. Having some regular tags and annotation tags with the same name is not an issue for me. If Zotero ever provides another way to distinguish between regular and annotation tags I will just remove the #, to merge the tags.

    A full tag ontology or nested tags system has been requested many times. It can be achieved in some ways with plugins, eg Ethereal Style ...
    https://github.com/MuiseDestiny/zotero-style#nested-tags

    Re getting annotation tags from attachments also applied to the parent item's tag list, this script for the Actions and Tags plugin was posted on Reddit today ...
    https://www.reddit.com/r/zotero/comments/1pu6uw7/comment/nvmmr30/
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