Retrieve metada from PDFs greyed out

superpyrin
I dragged few PDFs into my zotero library but I cannot retrieve the metadata for them because the menu item is grayed out. It does not matter whether I select a single PDF or all of them. Using zotero version 2.0.3, firefox 3.6.6 on windows xp. The pdftotext and pdfinfo helper are installed and up-to-date. What can I do to fix it? Thanks.
  • dstillman
    Are they standalone attachments or child attachments? You can only retrieve metadata on the former.
  • adamsmith
    yeah - but on the latter there is no "Retrieve Metadata" in the context menu at all, while superpyrin says it's grayed out for him/her. When is retrieve metadata ever grayed out?
  • dstillman
    Hmm, good point. It shouldn't be, really, unless you don't have write access to a (group) library—but in that case you shouldn't be able to drag PDFs in either.

    superpryin: Is this your personal library or a group library? If the latter, can you still make changes? Have you restarted Firefox?
  • superpyrin
    It is my personal library, I can make changes to it. The PDFs are top standalone items, I just dragged PDF files into a collection. Restart of Firefox did not help.
  • superpyrin
    The problem seemed to be solved after I uninstalled VUE3 plugin for Zotero. I was able to retrieve the metadata for a single PDF. However, it persists on subsequent trials.
  • dstillman
    Disable all other Firefox extensions.
  • superpyrin
    Disabling other extensions helped. More specifically, I disabled JavaConsole, Java Quick Starter, FireMath and DownloadHelper. I am not sure which one is the culprit, I would have to try one by one, my guess is that it was one of the java extensions. Thanks.
  • adamsmith
    If you could test which one was the culprit that'd be helpful (i.e. disable one by one - once you think you've got it, restart Firefox one more time and try again to make sure it's reproducible).
  • superpyrin
    I cannot reproduce it, I enabled all the extensions that I previously disabled and the retrieval of metadata is working properly.
  • rpo
    I had the same problem of a grayed out option to import metadata: I disabled DownloadHelper, restarted, and it was solved. I then enabled it again, restarted, and problem did not reappear!

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