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If it wasn't for this horrifying oversight that they inexplicably don't care about (it's been a highly upvoted issues in their bug tracker for years!), or if you just want to take your chances on this not being an issue for you, then you can live happily within the Mendeley ecosystem and enjoy pretty much all the benefits offered by my system. Mendeley is an impressive alternative, but be warned that you will have a bad time if you ever have an editor or professor who asks you to convert endnote citations to footnotes, or vice versa. I promise that I'm all about making it so that my tech actually makes my life easier. I know this sounds like a very complex system, but it's really just one of those things that's harder to explain than to use. Note that to extract the highlights from your PDFs, you'll right-click them in Zotero and use options provided by Zotfile to do the magic. And if you provide the link to somebody else, then it will do the same for them (except they'll just be shown the sample for the book). This should make it so that when you double-click on it in Zotero, your Kindle book should open in your browser. Then, in the Zotero program, go to the entry for it and add " " for the URL (but change the Xs to whatever the ASIN is for the Kindle book, which can be found on its store page). Use the Zotero extension to add it to your Zotero database. Kindle book management: On the Amazon site, go to the page for the Kindle book you bought. This works for every major academic database that I could think of. For an example, go here and then click the little folder icon on the right side of your URL bar (that's how the Zotero extension works in Chrome, anyway). Zotero can often batch download (and use the database's info to properly tag) the PDFs you want. The true power of this is revealed when you are browsing research databses. ![]() ![]() Let Zotero download the PDFs for you when possible: Install the Zotero extension for your browser. Let it organize them for you however you like. Tell Zotfile to watch the Unsorted folder for new files, and have it automatically rename and move them to Sorted. Inside that, make two more folders: Sorted, and Unsorted. Also, tell Zotero to use a relative path for the folder where you plan to keep your PDFs (go to Preferences>Advanced>Link Attachment Base Directory).Īnd since I've come this far, here are some handy tips that made it all even better.Īuto-organize the files and folders: Keep all your PDFs in a folder called Academic Library or whatever you want. ![]() Just remember to tell Zotero not to do attachment syncing (go to Preferences>Sync, then uncheck both settings under "File Syncing"). Happens to do other wonderful things too.ĭropbox - But any similar file/folder sync tool should work, really. Zotfile extension for Zotero - Needed for the wonderful annotation extraction. definitely a pattern of excitement followed by anger and disappointment. I experienced this with Mendeley, Colwiz, Readcube. Zotero - I also couldn't believe how other reference manager tools would seem wonderful and then end up missing some essential functionality that I knew from experience would come back to bite me. You can use whatever PDF viewer/annotator you want, as long as you verify that it saves the annotations to the PDF itself. Anyway, the reason to use Foxit is because it's faster. I believe the non-free version of Foxit has an OCR engine built in, so that might be worth it. I have Adobe Creative Cloud and it's included, so why not? But there are other OCR solutions. If I receive a PDF that doesn't have selectable text, then I'll use Acrobat Pro to fix that. With these goals in mind, this is what I ultimately have settled on:įoxit Reader - I couldn't believe how many PDF readers lack highlighting capabilities, or "helpfully" do highlighting in a way that doesn't actually store the highlights with the file. ![]() Should not be dependent on any particular program or device. Reference manager should be able to detect and even extract the PDF highlights.Įverything should be seamlessly, automatically, reliably synchronized across devices. Reference manager program should organize the same PDFs that are being highlighted. You'll be able to tell very quickly that I think annotations and reference management both need to be considered when putting together a reference management system.Īctually edit the PDF file, so that highlights can be seen if the PDF is accessed elsewhere for any reason. I spent countless hours trying to figure out how I should organize my references, and then days rebuilding my whole reference library after learning some things the hard way.Īnyway, here are what I see as the goals. I spent an enormous time researching this, trying different solutions, backtracking, re-experimenting.
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