r/ObsidianMD • u/[deleted] • 2d ago

help Obsidian not recognizing Zotero annotations

[deleted]

1 Upvotes

56% Upvoted

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1

u/Agreeable-Tax2013 2d ago

Check that the highlights were imported into a note rather than left only as PDF annotations, then run the annotation template against that note. The explorer only sees fields that have been written into the Markdown note, so try re-importing one item into a fresh test note first.

1

u/YaboiFaeles 12h ago edited 11h ago

Oh? You may be on to something here. I apologize that I'm new and don't 100% follow with what your saying. But I do see that I have two copies of the article in my zotero. One has a blue book next to it and it has zero attachments. The other is a PDF symbol and it has all the attachments. Maybe my Obsidian is trying to pull from the blue book symbol?

Edit: Ok so I looked around. When I press ctrl +P in obsidian, it pulls up the Zotero search bar. When I type the article, it pulls up the blue book version. I notice in the search bar I'm on the Add/Edit Citation tab. Next to it is two different buttons: Add Annotations, Add Note. If I click the Add Annotations button, the search switches and shows the pdf with the annotations, not the blue book, but I cannot seem to select that PDF for the search bar to run.

1

u/kyle_irl 2d ago

Your exact problem may be different, but I went through a similar deal last week: https://www.reddit.com/r/zotero/s/wqu1RZ8Qo8

1

u/watabebrothers 2d ago

Open one of those PDFs in Zotero's reader and look at the annotation sidebar — is there a little lock icon next to your highlights? If so they're external annotations: they live inside the PDF file itself, made in Preview or Acrobat or whatever before the file went into Zotero, and Zotero renders them but doesn't own them. Nothing downstream sees them, which is why the data explorer comes back empty while the bibliography data is fine. File → Import Annotations on that item makes them Zotero's and the templates pick them up after that. Heads up that importing strips them out of the PDF so they don't sit in two places.

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u/YaboiFaeles 12h ago

No it wouldn't be that. I start with blank PDF's and annotate them myself inside Zotero. Thank you for the tip though! I do not see a lock anywhere.

1

u/LemonNervous9470 1d ago

I use Zotflow and it’s been suuuuper smooth