org-pdftools VS oauth2ms

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

Funny, just dealt with the whole O365 authentication just this week. With moving to 2 factor authentication you need to use OAuth 2 to do anything with it. I have my (work) O365 email forwarded, so I do have normal IMAP access. I use isync/mbsync [1] to receive email, goimapnotify [2] to get pushed new email, read/reply/etc with mu4e [3] and org-msg [4] and org-mode, and until recently just plain SMTP to send mail. This last part will break with 2 factor, but found oauth2ms [5] to set up the OAuth to work with O365 SMTP. The trick was to find the "tenet ID" from the Azure page of your organization and to use Thunderbird's credentials [6] (or another mail program, since I can't make new app registrations on Azure to have my own "application"). That should also allow you to use IMAP with OAuth 2 as well, but haven't done that since I still have the forwarding. (As usual, I think the Arch Wiki [7] covers most of this too.)

[1] http://isync.sourceforge.net/

[2] https://gitlab.com/shackra/goimapnotify

[3] https://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html

[4] https://github.com/jeremy-compostella/org-msg

[5] https://github.com/harishkrupo/oauth2ms

[6] https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/file/tip/mailnews/base/s...

[7] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Isync#Using_XOAUTH2

I’ve been using this successfully for the last year: https://github.com/harishkrupo/oauth2ms

@harishkrupo has posted over on r/emacs and helpfully described in even more detail on github the steps to follow to get mbsync working with office365 and has written a python script that handles getting the token from the identity server and putting it into a format that mbsync can use. Crucially, he explains how to set up the azure app that the token is generated for. Really, this guide made a lot of things clear that I had been absolutely muddling through previously.

This works well: https://github.com/harishkrupo/oauth2ms Does require setting up an App in your Microsoft tenant (don’t know if it works across tenants)