DT3 / Onyx Boox / Zotero

DEVONthink
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Building on this thread here: Using DT3 with a Onyx Boox (Android Based E-Reader)

I have the same conundrum, with the additional element of using Zotero.

On the one hand, Zotero is good if you store your PDFs in it, because you can get a Zotero Android client (Zoo for Zotero) - unfortunately highlights made in the native Boox reader don’t sync back to Zotero but I was making some progress using a third party reader.

But I’ve also never really worked out how best to use Zotero and DT together. At the moment these are existing as two entirely separate apps in my workflow. A lot of the info on here on using DT and Zotero is now quite old - what are people doing (if anything) to use these two apps together?

My workflow is:

  1. I store all my PDFs in DT. When I’m ready to start a study project, I copy the relevant ones into Zotero, access the metadata, and the PDF file is renamed as the citekey.
  2. I potentially use Zoo for Zotero on an Onyx Boox device to do initial reading of academic papers and very simple pen annotations.
  3. I use Zotero on the ipad and / or Mac to annotate PDFs with highlights / comments.
  4. If on my Mac, I export highlights and notes as Markdown from within Zotero. If on my ipad, I share the PDF to Highlights app and export as Markdown.

Any builds / tips / feedback on how to do this better?

I’ve considered using an indexed dropbox folder to keep PDFs in, which to avoid three copies of PDFs (original DT file, Zotero file, dropbox file) plus the indexed file would mean I need to delete them from DT when I put them into Zotero. But also I use the citekey as the filename in Zotero, so my indexed file in DT would be the cite key and not the author / book (or paper) title that I use in DT.

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Zotero and how it can be used with DT was the topic of many threads here in the forum.

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It is, but when sorted by relevance, many of these topics are a year or so old, and things move on all the time.

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I have an application called AutoSync in my Boox that syncs the Boox documents folder two ways between Dropbox and Boox itself. You can set the AutoSync thing to automatically sync when changes happen or manually. I have it manually and run once I’ve finished with Boox native application (that is superior to blank dirty scanned backgrounds in PDFs).

The only warning is to close the PDF in Boox viewer to allow it save annotations.

But as Boox is Android, you even can use programs like XODO, that can directly talk with clouds like Dropbox, OneDrive and so on.

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