Information Management Archives • RememberEverything

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How to Create, Extract, and Manage PDF Annotations and Highlights

April 20, 2016April 20, 2016 by Helmut

An efficient workflow for annotating PDFs, extracting highlights and comments, and filing them is essential for research, writing, and studying. Ideally highlights and comments should contain back-links that take you right back to the correct page in the PDF source document.

Adobe’s Acrobat Reader DC, PDF-XChange Editor, and various other PDF readers allow you to annotate PDF files. But, you don’t want these annotations to remain “imprisoned” in your PDF. Your highlights and comments become a lot more useful if you can extract them, aggregate markups from several documents, and re-find them when you need them. Unsurprisingly, the free version of Acrobat Reader doesn’t allow the export of annotations as a word or text file.

To accomplish this in an elegant way, I recommend that you manage your PDF documents in Zotero, a free, open-source research document management system created and maintained by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (George Mason University). With Zotero, you can collect and organize a large variety of document types, including PDF documents and web pages with the click of a few buttons.
To extract and manage PDF annotations in Zotero, you additionally need the free add-on Zotfile from zotfile.com. Zotfile was created by Joscha Legewie, a professor at New York University. A big thank you to Dr. Legewie for programming and maintaining this excellent cannot-live-without add-on!

Managing Kindle Highlights and Notes in Zotero, Evernote, and OneNote

April 21, 2014February 4, 2014 by Helmut

Amazon’s Kindle allows you to highlight passages in books and take notes. Do you want to export and organize these highlights and notes, so that you can archive, review, search, and share them? Then this post is for you.

Let me put forward some suggestions on how you can save and manage a Kindle book’s annotations together with its bibliographic information in your Zotero library. We are also going to look at saving Kindle annotations in Evernote and OneNote and linking these notes to a Zotero library. The exported annotations will allow us to jump directly to the corresponding locations in the book. For more info on Zotero, please check this post.

In the following, I use Spark!: How exercise will improve the performance of your brain, by John J. Ratey and Eric Hagerman to illustrate the procedure.

Let’s get started by saving the book’s bibliographic information to Zotero

Find the book’s sales page on Amazon.
Open your Zotero library, open the collection (here Brain Improvement) in which you want to save the book’s information and Kindle annotations, and click the book symbol:

This will save the book’s bibliographic entry as an item in your Zotero library.

Next, we are going to retrieve the highlights and notes for the book

Syncing Zotero with Dropbox and Between Several Computers

July 22, 2013July 21, 2013 by Helmut

In this post I want to shed some light on how you can sync your Zotero library between different computers, and between your computer and Dropbox, a popular cloud storage service. Due to the nature of the matter, what follows is somewhat technical, but don’t let that deter you. Once setup, the synchronization works automatically in the background, without any further effort.

In a previous post, I introduced Zotero, a popular free research tool by the Roy Rosenberg Center for History and New Media of George Mason University. As a brief recap: Zotero allows you to organize all your research sources and create a complete digital library with the click of a few buttons. To learn more about this fantastic tool and why every knowledge worker should consider using it, please check this post.

Recommended approach for syncing Zotero between different computers.

Zotero allows you to synchronize everything via its own cloud storage service, Zotero Storage. “Everything” includes:

the Zotero data (i.e., the database with all bibliographic information, tags, and notes)
the Zotero files (i.e. attachments, such as PDF documents, videos, books, and webpage snapshots)

The basic plan (upto 300 MB) is free. 2GB will cost you $1.67 per month ($20 per year), and 6 GB set you back $5 per month ($60 per year). IMO, Zotero Storage should be your first consideration as it is very easy to setup and manage, it is affordable, and your payments support the up-keeping of the infrastructure.

There are, however, some good reasons why you might want to employ a different method to sync your Zotero files:

You have a very large number of attachments or some very large attachments.
You have already subscribed to a service like the popular Dropbox, and would rather avoid paying for an additional cloud storage service.
You have a very slow or expensive internet connection, but have your computers connected via a local area network.
You are looking for a solution to create a local backup for your files (and database).

(The database is usually below the free storage limit and should always be synchronized via Zotero’s cloud service.)

Here then are some alternative solutions you can employ:

How to Create a Secure Password You Can Remember

January 23, 2013November 29, 2012 by Helmut

Creating a secure password is one of the most important things you can do to prevent break-ins into your Internet account.

How secure is my password?

One of the easiest approaches identity thieves use to get hold of other people’s accounts is just guessing their password. That’s right, many people make passwords that are not secure. They are either very short or contain information that a person only slightly familiar with them can guess. Slightly familiar might just mean – they know you from Facebook. If your password is less than 8 characters, or contains words, phrases, or names that can be found in a dictionary, your password is not very secure.

The problem many people face is to think up a password they won’t forget, but at the same time cannot be guessed by other people.

A secure password should be as long as possible and a combination of letters, numbers, and special symbols. It should be easy to remember and difficult if not impossible to guess.

Aim for a length of at least 8 character. If you want to protect sensitive data, (e.g., an encrypted hard drive) I would go for a password with at least 15 characters. The longer you can make your password, the better. Make sure you don’t use your spouse’s, child’s or dog’s name, birthday, or any other information that can easily be guessed. Also, don’t use your credit card number or the like as a password. – Or would you want the owner of a website to get hold of this information?

How to create a strong password?

Zotero – Create Your Digital Library for Knowledge, Research, and Citation Management

April 23, 2016November 5, 2012 by Helmut

Introducing Zotero, free, open-source research software to collect, organize, manage, and share all kinds of information. This includes web pages, articles, research papers, videos, PDF documents and annotations, complete books, and your own notes. Zotero takes the pain out of managing citations and creating bibliographies. It features a Word plugin that works seamlessly with Word and formats citations in all common citation styles.

My Very Personal Smartphone History

October 9, 2012September 17, 2012 by Helmut

This year, in early August, I made the transition to a Samsung Galaxy S III, my first Android smartphone. In the future, you can expect to see several blog posts on how I am (hopefully) making my Galaxy into a productive powerhouse. The first post is already out. After all, without integrating it into one’s personal information management, any smartphone is just an expensive toy.

For me, this is the perfect time to look back at my personal smartphone history.

It started in June 2004 at Hong Kong’s international airport with a Sony Ericsson P900 (the smartphone on the left in the picture).

How to Really Keep all Files in Sync between Your Androids and PCs

September 27, 2012September 12, 2012 by Helmut

With many people now owning a PC, a tablet, and a smartphone, Dropbox has become a very popular service to keep files in sync. You place your files, folders and subfolders in your PC’s Dropbox folder, and they should in principle be available in the cloud and on every other device with an installed Dropbox app.

Unfortunately, unlike the Windows app, Dropbox for Android phones and tablets doesn’t quite work this way. Only files you have marked as “Favorites” are downloaded to your local tablet or smartphone and thus available offline. All other files in your Android’s Dropbox are only accessible if you have a network connection, so for example not on a plane, not when you are on an expensive mobile network in a foreign country, and so on. What’s more, you can only mark files, not complete folders as favorites, and if a particular program doesn’t directly support Dropbox, you are out of luck as well. In a nutshell, Dropbox on Android is missing the sync.

As you can imagine, I was quite disappointed when I tried to sync my first Android phone. Are we in the 21^st century, or what?