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/
  • Thanks a lot Tim820 for your detailed answer and tips. I might understand "then select the ones you want" wrongly, but when I have the annotated pdf open, and see the tags bottom left, I can select them by clicking on them, but right clicking on the selected tags does not give any popup menu, and I searched but cannot find where the "Add to Note" menu item is ( I had created a new empty note before).
    Also thanks for the reddit script and the ActionsandTags plugin, it does exactly what I would need :-)
    However,
    I have copied the script from the Redditpost from the
    "/**"
    to
    "return; })();"

    and created an Action based on the instructions on the GitHub, but I get an error "expected expression , got '('

    Any ideas ?

    Opposite to your way of doing, I would actually prefer to see the list of my tags when annotating a pdf to be sure that I still use the normal tags that I had created in the same way. So reading through the pdf allows me annotating and classifying the pdf by tags at the same time.

    Cheers

    Oliver
  • Once you have your tagged annotations displayed in the left pane, and your note is opened in the right pane, you can then right-click on any of the selected *annotations* (not tags) in the left pane (you can select just one or more than one annotation there) that you want to transfer to your note. You should then see the active Add To Note option in that right-click menu. The selected annotation(s) should then be transferred into the note on the right.

    You would have to refer the Actions and Tags script issue back to the original poster on Reddit, or raise an Issue on Github.
  • Ok, thanks, got it, but that does only allow to move the annotations to the note, and not the tags. I have put a new discussion on the script on the Github. I'll keep you posted if I get any replies.
    Oliver
  • You can apparently add an annotation's tags to the annotation when added to a note ... via a custom-written note template ...
    https://www.zotero.org/support/note_templates
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