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I am using the Firefox extension Zotero on 12.04. Zotero complains about missing PDF tools, though:

To use this feature, you must first install 
the PDF tools in the Search pane of the Zotero preferences.

and

Available downloads for Linux x86_64 from zotero.org:
- pdftotext version 3.02
- pdfinfo version 3.02
Zotero can automatically install these applications into the Zotero data directory.

So the missing PDF tools appear to be pdftotext & pdfinfo. However, they should already be available (in older versions) via the installed Ubuntu package poppler-utils.

Why doesn't Zotero find these programs? Of course, I could just reinstall them in the suggested way but generally I prefer to install software only from the Ubuntu repository.

Josh Pinto
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Alex1357
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  • Please open a shell and type which pdftotext --- if it gives a result, either a) Zotero extension is buggy or b) it needs a different version. (Strange --- in 14.04 my pdftotext says it's on version 0.24.5 --- could they really be different tools with the same name?) – Rmano Oct 14 '14 at 10:21
  • which pdftotext gives /usr/bin/pdftotext; version is 0.18.4 – Alex1357 Oct 14 '14 at 10:25
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    In case you're courious about the different version numbers: Zotero uses pdftotext straight from Xpdf (the most recent versino there is 3.0.4). In Ubuntu (as in most distros) it's packed with poppler, which uses a different versioning system. – adam.smith Oct 15 '14 at 07:05

1 Answers1

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From the Zotero documentation

Zotero uses customized, platform-specific versions of the pdfinfo and pdftotext utilities from the open-source Xpdf project for PDF indexing. Specifically, Zotero uses modified binaries of pdfinfo and pdftotext on Windows to prevent the command-prompt window from appearing at indexing time, and a custom build of pdfinfo on all platforms that support writing to a text file (see source code).

So this is expected behavior on the part of both Zotero and Ubuntu. (FWIW, though "install software" is a rather strong word here: it just downloads two files and places them in the Zotero data folder)

adam.smith
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