DT3, Zotero and Obsidian

Knowledge management
1

I have a question with regards to a workflow between DT3, Zotero and Obsidian. I use Zotero only for metadata (the reference). It does not contain any PDFs or the like as I usually work with print books and just think DT3 is better for handling all the rest. So Zotero is where my sources start and I think of it as some way of standardising my references and the metadata. Next I create a folder in DT3 where I could put in some scans from the books, some PDFs or maybe the actual PDF if it is an article or the like. An allround folder for everything related to the source. Finally I use the Citations plugin in Obsidian to grab the citations and metadata from Zotero and create a markdown file with all the metadata plus the Zotero URI-link and the DT3 x-callback-link. My obsidian folder resides in iCloud Drive and is indexed to DT3 as well.

Now this is where the workflow starts to crumble. I now have two folders in DT3 about the source. One is the indexed folder from Obsidian, and the other is the internal/imported folder I created in DT3 with all the PDFs etc. Does anyone have any ideas about what I should do here? Is it possible to have the indexed folder from Obsidian and then internally in DT3 place imported files in that folder? Would it distort it in Obsidian and/or in DT3?

I hope anyone can help and please ask me for more information if I’m missing something.

2

Play around with the Zotfile plugin for Zotero. You can use it to organize PDFs into a folder, then index that folder with DT3.

Heck, you could put that folder in your Obsidian vault—then all three apps would be nicely stacked upon the same folder of files.

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Totally. Files dropped into an indexed folder in DT3 automatically become files in that folder on the file system. It works exactly as you’d expect.

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Thank you Ryan!
I have for some reason always been hesitant with using Zotfile as I thought it didn’t fit my mainly use of print books.

What I do in the DT3-folder is to OCR-Scan (with the ios app vFlat) the table of contents and the index from all my books so that I can search for keywords in all of my books and the library books I bring home from the university library.

1 Like
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Zotero (via Zotfile) and DEVONthink indexing will look at the exact same files. They should complement one another.