Annotation not imported

[MinjieHu]

Hi,

When I try to create a research note, only the metadata of the paper is fetched, but the annotation is not included. See the example below:

I check the paper in Zotero and do find annotations there. Since I use a linked pdf, I opened the pdf file with the default system pdf viewer(Preview) and found there is no annotation in the pdf file. I guess zotero stored the annotation out of the pdf file which may lead to the issue. Can you suggest any way to get around this?

Thank you again!

[MinjieHu]

I searched online and based on Elena Razlogova tutorial (https://publish.obsidian.md/history-notes/01+Notetaking+for+Historians), it should be able to fetch the annotation from Zotero. So I suspect the PDF Utility may extract the information directly from the pdf file which doesn't contain any annotation. So I reinstalled the plugin, and this time I didn't download the PDF Utility.

This time another error pops up.

I checked the quick copy option and can't find any issue with it.

My zotero version is 6.0.15, Obsidian version is 0.15.9.

[mgmeyers]

@MinjieHu That last screenshot is the citation style for the Cite command. The one used for imports looks like this:

What is that set to?

[MinjieHu]

You are right. This set is not matching. When I change to the same bibliography style, this error is cleared.

However, the annotation is still not fetched😥.

[MinjieHu]

It is weird when I try with four other papers, they all worked. All the one I tried before is not working.

[mgmeyers]

Hmm, any errors (red text) in Obsidian's developer console when you try to import that paper? You can open it by pressing cmd/ctrl + shift + i

[MinjieHu]

No, not any.

[volker-fr]

Might be related to #107

How many attachments does the item you import have?

[mbojan]

I sadly confirm that importing annotations seems to stop working: no annotations in the data explorer (and hence in notes generated with a template that should handle them). Obsidian developer console says:

I also noticed that when I try to "Create research note" and use the pop-up to search Zotero the results include the parent item and the PDF separately. I don't think it happened before (I may be wrong though).

I'll be happy to poke in my Obsidian and Zotero to debug this further. Just let me know where. It is a crucial functionality for me.

[MinjieHu]

@volker-fr
Here are the attached I had for this particular entry:

[volker-fr]

@mbojan & @MinjieHu can you try to update to the latest plugin version of Better Bibtex? The latest release version can be found here: https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex/releases Zotero offered me to update it, but the version of the update wasn't the latest, I had to manually install the xpi file.

This solved my issue thanks to the fix from mgmeyers. See also #107

[mbojan]

Thanks @volker-fr! Updating Better Bibtex indeed fixes the issue for me.

[MinjieHu]

@volker-fr after updating, it imports a figure when I highlighted. But the not annotation is still not imported. Since my other paper doesn't have this issue, this may be due to some specificity of this pdf file?

[volker-fr]

@MinjieHu Hand written annotations are indeed not imported. It's not implemented, but will no longer crash the import of the other annotation kinds.

I suggest to open a separate ticket/feature request for this.

[weztherw]

I have the same issue. The zotero integration plugin can import metadata of all papers, but can only import annotations of some papers. Zotero Data Explorer listed 0 annotation items for papers with annotations that weren't imported. I'm using the latest version of everything. I don't see any error in the Obsidian's developer console.

I'm no programmer, but I guess if annotations can't be imported while metadata can, likely that it has something to do with the PDF Utility that is supposed to extract data from PDFs.

@MinjieHu, any chance that you have found a fix? Thanks in advance!

[mgmeyers]

I've updated the plugin so that the data explorer and imports use the same code. Try updating to the latest version and see if this is still an issue.

[weztherw]

Thanks for the latest version. I've just tested it, but it still doesn't import annotations that I had tried to import before. The annotations are from a paper that is the only attachment in a parent item, and this parent item doesn’t share its Citation Key with any other item. Would it help if I provide an example paper through DM?