org-pdftools VS .emacs.d

An alternative is to open PDFs, from Zotero or from anywhere else, with Emacs' pdf-tools (https://github.com/vedang/pdf-tools). If you annotate the pdf, those annotations are part of the pdf. And you can also use org-noter (https://github.com/weirdNox/org-noter) and org-noter-pdftools (https://github.com/fuxialexander/org-pdftools; but see https://github.com/fuxialexander/org-pdftools/issues/93#issuecomment-1493314118 if you use the new org-noter from https://github.com/org-noter/org-noter).

Periodically, I go through the pdfs I've read (I have a collection in Zotero for the stuff I am in the process of reading) and I use org-noter-pdftools (see https://github.com/fuxialexander/org-pdftools ; this is different from, and extends and depends on, org-noter which, by the way, has recently got new maintainers) to extract all annotations in the pdf to a note that is associated to each pdf. One to one mapping here: one pdf file - one .org file for notes. These notes are basically just org(-roam) files that store the annotations for easy searching (see below) and to allow my linking to specific, individual, highlights (or text annotations). I think that initially setting everything up to my satisfaction was a little bit confusing (e.g., the names of some functions I think are the same between org-noter and org-noter-pdftools and sometimes it was unclear to me the differences in functionality between the two packages); but now it works flawlessly. From org-noter-pdftools I specially like how easy it is to get all the highlights, text annotations, etc (not manual scribbling, of course, and see also below for "typewritter" annotations) into an org-roam note that links directly to the exact location in the pdf.

Check out my screencast on org-noter. I don't think anything else comes close to this kind of workflow. Unfortunately it's not production ready yet. There's a related project org-noter--pdftools, I don't recall what it's state is.

First I tried config from here - https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/19686/how-to-use-pdf-tools-pdf-view-mode-in-emacs but the package in unmaintained, so I used https://github.com/fuxialexander/org-pdftools

[2] https://github.com/fuxialexander/org-pdftools

That's weird. I use package.el and it only ever updates when I ask it to.

The solution to this is too keep your elpa/ directory under version control.

I use this hacked-up script to help me do that: https://github.com/NateEag/.emacs.d/blob/master/site-lisp/up...