Upgrade StorageExtract PDF sections while preserving annotations
Hello.
A lot of my items are edited books. There are different authors for each chapter. Sometimes chapters are available as separate files, and this makes it easy to add them to Zotero. But sometimes, only the entire book is offered as a single file.
As time goes on, I add a number of annotations (mostly highlighting) to the different chapters of the book. Then, there comes a time when I find that I would like to regularly cite different chapters, and so I create Zotero items for them.
It is a lot easier read, annotate, search, and re-read separate PDFs for each chapter than one large PDF. This issue is: How can I split a larger PDF into smaller sections *while preserving the annotations (as well as the tags on those annotations)*?
I know there are various ways to split a PDF outside of Zotero, and even in Zotero, it is possible to delete pages. I thought maybe I could copy the attachment and delete all of the other pages, but there is no option to duplicate the attachment, and the "Duplicate item" command does not also copy the attachment.
Thank you in advance.
A lot of my items are edited books. There are different authors for each chapter. Sometimes chapters are available as separate files, and this makes it easy to add them to Zotero. But sometimes, only the entire book is offered as a single file.
As time goes on, I add a number of annotations (mostly highlighting) to the different chapters of the book. Then, there comes a time when I find that I would like to regularly cite different chapters, and so I create Zotero items for them.
It is a lot easier read, annotate, search, and re-read separate PDFs for each chapter than one large PDF. This issue is: How can I split a larger PDF into smaller sections *while preserving the annotations (as well as the tags on those annotations)*?
I know there are various ways to split a PDF outside of Zotero, and even in Zotero, it is possible to delete pages. I thought maybe I could copy the attachment and delete all of the other pages, but there is no option to duplicate the attachment, and the "Duplicate item" command does not also copy the attachment.
Thank you in advance.
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adamsmithExport the PDF from the File menu in Zotero (not in the reader). This will write annotations to the PDF, split it into sections in the PDF tool of your choice, then add the sections to Zotero items and import annotations in Zotero (I have briefly tested that this preserves tags, but no complete guarantee)
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rrryannnThank you! I did not find this method to preserve tags, but it is still very helpful for the highlighting.
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rrryannnTo update, I have found that the tags *are* usually preserved. The smaller test-instance I first did was with Apple Preview, and that did not preserve tags. Then I tried again with a larger split operation with PDFsam ("by bookmark" made it easy since the original file had them (meaning a table of contents)), and that preserved the tags in all or almost all cases. (Also, one extracted section preserved highlights but not the text with them, so I just had to re-highlight those.)
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adamsmithThat make sense -- I'm not sure what Zotero uses in exporting the tags, but it has to be fairly obscure or not even part of the PDF standard, so some apps may remove the tags -- not surprised Preview does.