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Extracting Annotations from PDF
On pages 77-78 of Donna Cox Baker's book, Zotero for Genealogy, she discuss extracting annotations from PDF’s. Using your suggestions on page 76, I was able to successfully send the PDF to my reading stack. When it comes time to extract the highlighted portion of the PDF, what I get is a note: “ZotFile: Attachments got from tablet” which appears at the lower left of the Zotero screen (see the arrow in the attached screen shot). No matter what I do, I cannot get the “ZotFile: Attachments got from tablet” to open (when I click on it, whether right or left click, it just disappears). Therefore, as stated in Step 4 of Exercise 13 on page 78, no note called Extracted Annotations appears. I have tried to open note by right clicking on the research item Descriptive Pamphlet, the PDF annotated, and the PDF but nothing happens.
The one way that I have found that works is to save the highlighted text to the memory of my computer, then to click on the “ZotFile: Attachments got from tablet” which makes it disappear, and then to right click on the research item Descriptive Pamphlet and highlight “add note from annotations,” which then brings up an empty note. In that empty note, I can paste the information stored in the memory of my computer. This is a cumbersome way to do this, is there a simpler way that I am missing?
By way of information, unlike what is shown in the book, I am using Adobe Acrobat Reader, rather than Adobe Acrobat Pro, but do not think that should make a difference. Also, I see that the ZotFile software has not been updated much in the last few years. I note in reading info on the forum that there may be new ways Zotero uses or does not use ZotFile. What am I doing wrong?
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Hello, astro_ccd. So sorry for this inconvenience to you, but Zotero was in Release 5 when my book was published. While much of it still works as it did then, this is one area that changed with Release 6 and will change more with Release 7. I have a new book ready, but can't publish it until Zotero formally releases 7. I hope that will be soon.
Zotfile is being discontinued with Release 7, but most of its features are now embedded into Zotero 7, which is available in beta form. I have been using the beta for nearly six months, and it's quite stable, if you want to go ahead and update. You can find the installation link at https://www.zotero.org/support/beta_builds.
A major change to handling PDFs was launched in Release 6. Zotero included its own PDF Reader, which in Release 7 also includes ePUBs and HTML snapshots. Your annotations in the Reader can be converted to a note in both Release 6 and 7. In Release 7, you can selectively move individual annotations into selected notes or move all annotations at one time into a single note. But in either release, you can right-click on the PDF in your Research List, and choose to Add Note from Annotations. (I'm looking at Release 7 when I say this, so the wording might be slightly different in Research 6.)
You can still open your PDFs in external software like Adobe, if you prefer, but I don't know if the annotations made outside the Zotero reader will be included in the annotations Zotero will turn into a note. I am in the process of fixing a PDF-related corruption on my PC and can't test it at the moment. But let us know what happens for you.
If you are creating annotations using Zotero's Reader (recommended), annotations are actually in a separate layer--not embedded in the PDF. If you highlight some text in a PDF in Zotero, then open the same PDF in Adobe, the highlights will not appear. You'd have to export the PDF from Zotero to see the annotations outside Zotero. This is a minor inconvenience for what we get for it. This prevents Zotero from having to sync an entire huge PDF every time you highlight a sentence. The only thing Zotero will sync is the highlighted text...MUCH faster and more efficient.
Let me know if this raises other questions. Thanks!
Thanks so much for your reply. I am excited for the new edition of your book. Hopefully it will be available soon. That being said, as I work my way through your current edition, it has been very instructive. The explanations are wonderful and the test examples are very helpful. One more question about your new edition. Will it use Evidence Explained 4th edition rather than the 3rd edition revised? I find that the 4th edition is very much improved over the third edition revised, particularly new chapter 3 is very helpful with wonderful templates. Best regards.
I agree! I just got my 4th edition of Evidence Explained, and the new template approach in chapter 3 revolutionizes EE. I am just starting to work through the best Zotero response to it. I think the two will work together so much better now. My initial reaction to the new templates is that most of it can be done by using the Chicago Manual of Style format in Zotero and putting most of the EE layers into the "Loc in Archive" field. The syntax won't be an exact match, but I think it will be close and will get the job done that Dr. Mills intends with EE.
The new book is a "quick guide," and won't go into EE in detail. But I will probably follow soon after with a quick guide specifically about citations and make that a highlight. It will be MUCH easier to explain that it was with EE3.
