Upgrade StorageIs there a way for Zotero to extract a chapter from a book as a separate PDF?
As the title suggests. Sometimes I have a PDF of an edited book and find a particular chapter interesting. I would like to extract and quote only that chapter (Book Section).
My workaround so far was to find the PDF of a book, then open it in Adobe Acrobat, extract pages I want, fix page numbers, and save that PDF chapter. Then, in Zotero, I would right-click on the book, go "Create Book Section from a Book", put PDF of a chapter in it, and then manually add the author, page range, etc. And finally, I would manually add the annotations from the PDF book to PDF of a chapter.
Is there an easier way?
If not, then I think this function would be very useful in Zotero. Something like selecting pages from the thumbnails view, and right-click extracting them as a chapter with all annotatons existing on those pages.
My workaround so far was to find the PDF of a book, then open it in Adobe Acrobat, extract pages I want, fix page numbers, and save that PDF chapter. Then, in Zotero, I would right-click on the book, go "Create Book Section from a Book", put PDF of a chapter in it, and then manually add the author, page range, etc. And finally, I would manually add the annotations from the PDF book to PDF of a chapter.
Is there an easier way?
If not, then I think this function would be very useful in Zotero. Something like selecting pages from the thumbnails view, and right-click extracting them as a chapter with all annotatons existing on those pages.
None? :/
I don't think it would be hard to implement, and it would be very useful. I work a lot with edited books, and need only one or two chapters.
Usually, I start reading an edited book, annotate some important parts, and then realize: "This is actually good, I should quote this" - but then I have to go through extracting pages in Adobe and transfering annotations manually.
I have had to manually re-do annotations in chapter-only PDFs extracted from full-book PDFs multiple times over the years, and also manually delete the annotations from the chapter in the full-book PDF (so that one does not mistakenly add to them when re-visiting the book later). It's very tedious, unnecessary work.
So ideally the existing right-click Create Book Section should have additional options to extract a specified page range from a book's PDF, along with any annotations.
An alternative would be to allow Book Sections to *not* need their own separate PDF - some people here have expressed a dislike for having to store both a whole book PDF and also PDFs for some or all the chapters they want to cite separately. So a chapter item could instead be linked directly to a particular page range in the parent book's PDF, with the chapter item automatically inheriting the chapter's annotations in the book PDF. Those book chapters would also ideally have the option to appear under the parent book in the main pane, while still being individually cite-able ('Related' is not a strong/specific enough way to link book and chapter items).
What I simply would like is for Zotero to have this option integrated, so that I can skip the Adobe Acrobat step.
However, I don't think that the other idea could work, because it would mean that multiple parent items shared the same PDF. It seems to me more complex.
Regarding my second suggestion, the need for "composite" or "grouped" items (that also retain their individual identities) has been requested for a long time. A book with individual chapters is only one example of that concept. But there are many others - a series of lectures (eg within an academic course), a youtube playlist, a series of connected writings (eg thesis, preprints, conference papers, published papers, all covering the same material), thematic journal issues, etc. The Related tab is a very inefficient means of making those groupings, as it is a 'hold-all' for too many linkages of undefined type between items (cited references and 'cited-by' references, that most often end up under Related, should really have their own discrete tabs ... several plugins offer something like that, but it's so central to academic work that I think it should be core Zotero).