Tag: PDF

Import PDFs and related metadata in Zotero

I discover new things everyday …

I wrote earlier that I really liked Zotero, a reference management software. However, there is one thing that was missing, imho: the capability to import PDFs (individually or in bulk) and correctly fill in the various fields of the reference.

But in fact, this already exists in Zotero! Just drag a PDF in the middle section (the reference list) then right-click on it and choose “Retrieve Metadata from PDF” (*). Retrieval of the title, the authors, the journal, etc. everything goes very fast and they are stored as a normal reference, now on the right.

151203-Zotero-PDFtools-importMetadata

151203-Zotero-PDFtools-jobdone

Now, it works for most papers I tested yesterday and today. Most major editors are supported (it seems Zotero doesn’t actually extract metadata from the PDF but finds these metadata by comparing the PDF content with Google Scholar). As hinted in the Zotero support page for this function, please re-check the imported reference in case something went wrong (I imported something like 20 references since yesterday with this function and I didn’t spot any error for the moment).

Bulk import and metadata retrieval works too: just import several PDFs at the same time and, while all of them are selected in Zotero, right-click on them and choose “Retrieve Metadata for PDF”.

As mentioned earlier, “it’s just plain efficiency, without bells and whistles“. It just works 🙂

(*) On MS-Windows, on the first use, you might see a dialog box warning you that you must first install the “PDF tools”.

151203-Zotero-PDFtools-warning

If you see it, just choose the “Open preferences” button and follow the very intuitive procedure. The installation takes 30 seconds maximum, download included.

Waiting for PDF comments in Evince

Evince defines itself as “simply a document viewer” (for Linux/Gnome and now for Windows too). However it can already read a lot of formats: PDF, TIFF, PS, DVI, DJvu and plans to support a lot more in the future.

But for me there is one important feature missing: the ability to read comments in PDF files. I sent PDF versions of draft documents to my PhD thesis promoters and they send them back with their comments. Open them in Evince: you’ll only get the balloons but no possibility to click on them (see Figure 1 below). Open them in Acrobat Reader and not only you can see that there are comments but you can also see their content (see Figure 2 below).

Reading a PDF with comments in Evince
Figure 1: reading a PDF with comments in Evince

Reading a PDF with comments in Acrobat Reader
Figure 2: reading the same PDF with comments in Adobe Acrobat

It’s in the roadmap and Carlos García Campos already has an unstable release that includes annotations. So I’ll keep Acrobat Reader for the moment. As soon as Fedora packages Evince with annotations, I’ll not see any reasons to keep Acrobat Reader on my laptop 🙂

Btw, both Okular and KPDF also seem to miss this feature.