Zotero install pdf tools

Here is one: I dragged a recent Env. Technol article as a pdf from my literature directory into the middle panel of Zotero. It goes into a small window that never ends its job keeps showing the busy circle. Since the automatic installation of the pdftotext and pdfinfo did not work, I had downloaded the Win32 versions from Xpdf per instructions and put the two files with the proper names into the data director.

Zotero Preferences recognizes that they are there albeit with unknown version. When I run either command from the command line on this same pdf file, results are returned instantly. Why does Zotero hang? This sounds like some type of issue - maybe a permission issue? The automated installation of the pdf tools basically never fails.

So let's start with that. Move your custom installed pdf tools out of the Zotero folder. Restart Zotero. May 12, ZotFile uses the specified field as an input string and then applies the transformations specified in operations. The value of field can either be the name of a Zotero field see 1 or a javascript object with item type specific field names see 2.

Zotfile uses the exec function based on the regular expression defined in regex , and returns the element specified in group so that 0 returns the matched text and higher values the corresponding capturing parenthesis.

If the match fails, this operation returns the input data. Optional parameters: group default 0 , flags default "g". Zotfile uses the replace function with the regular expression regex and replacement string replacement.

Required parameters: regex , replacement. Optional parameters: flags default "g". Currently supported are toLowerCase , toUpperCase , and trim. A complete list of Zotero fields is available here dateModified and dateAdded seem to be missing from that list and all the item types are here. The fields for each item type are listed on this page.

Zotfile defines a number of additional fields that can be used as part of wildcards: itemType is the language specific item type, formatedTitle is the title formatted using the options defined in the zofile preferences, author is the author string formatted using the zotfile preferences, authorLastF is the author string formatted as LastnameF, and authorInitials are the initial of the authors.

Most importantly, validate your json. Check out zotfile. Finally, the JSON has to be reformatted to one line that can be pasted into the preference field in about:config. Here is the example from above:. The information in this file might not be up to date but you can look at the default wildcards and learn something about user-defined wildscards here.

The minified version in one line is here so that you can copy it to zotfile. Zotfile can extracted annotations and highlighted text from many PDF files. The extracted annotations are saved in Zotero notes and you can go back to the annotation in the pdf by clicking on the link after the extracted text.

PDFs are a very complex format and the extraction will never work for all files. If you can, there is a chance that future versions of zotfile will solve the problem. But only share files for which you can copy and paste text! Currently, pdf.

The poppler-based tool, however, is faster and might handle certain pdf standards that are not yet supported by pdf. Zotfile adds a link to extracted annotations that allows you to open the pdf file at the page with the annotation.

Just click on the link after some extracted text and your pdf should open on the correct location. On Windows, zotfile detects the default pdf viewer and opens the pdf on the correct page not tested for Windows 8. If zotfile is unable to detect the default viewer or you want to force zotfile to use a different viewer, simply change the hidden option zotfile.

Preview, however, does not support scripting very well and has certain limitations. Skim , an alternative pdf viewer for Mac OS, works much better! Just set the hidden option zotfile. For Linux, zotfile first tries okular and then evince but you can also set the zotfile. Zotfile has a number of hidden options that allow you to further configure zotfile. You can access the hidden options through about:config. Search for extensions. Here is a list of the options that can be changed by the user I strongly discourage to change any of the other options :.

With this option set to true, zotfile attaches all files in the user defined folder to the currently selected zotero item. Getting the file back from the tablet replaces the zotero attachment file and removes it from the tablet folder. This mode is recommended when you sync attachment files in your zotero library across multiple computers or when you index your attachments. In this mode there is always only one copy of the file. You can not, however, sync linked attachments to the zotero server.

By default, zotfile asks the user whether an attachment should be send to the tablet that is already on the tablet, which can be useful to move it to a different subfolder. November 24, edited November 24, Someone upline said it would open up in Mozilla. November 25, November 27, During the install, Make sure that on the 'Install Components' page the "Mozilla Add-In" is selected along with whatever other components you want non-English languages, IE plugin, etc 4.

Because all PDF viewers are applications external to Firefox, Zotero doesn't know about your annotations, for example, so you can't search them. Still you can bring up the PDFs in your Zotero database with a simple double click, annotate to your heart's content, and re-save the file. And it seems to work pretty well. Perhaps someday if it were possible to re-index a single file, Zotero could also include your annotations in its fulltext searches, but for now this isn't possible.

Reindexing the whole database is possible, but I don't know if this includes annotations. Thanks, Scot. I'll give it a try. March 3, You can add annotations in Zotero to txt-files, so this solves the problem. It is not take too much time to save it as a txt-file.

November 5, edited November 5, Pdf Exchange surprises me. I note of this viewer some time back, but ignore for the popular alternative, which I like. I then forget about it all together. Recently, I feel I must highlight a Pdf doc. Since I couldn't, I upload the document to Gmail as a first step. Next, I click view. In the Google preview, I then click, plain Html. After that I captured it with Zotero. It works. But the process mentioned above will soon wear you out, especially with large files.

Preferring to get the job done faster, you start searching for add-on or websites to quickly convert the pdf to html. Very few are out there, in my count. Even these for a prize.