I’ve used Zotero integration and Citations, and had a quick look at Zotlit, and I believe they all three do the same thing, though please correct me if I’m wrong. So you can have a look at each of them, decide which you like and play around with it for a while, since I think you only really need one of them.
I’ve used Citations most, so I’ll use that as an example, but you can do similar things with the others.
You will need to install the BetterBibTeX plugin for Zotero (let me know if you need help with that), and you’ll need to create a .bib file. That’s a long file with the bibliographic information of all your Zotero sources.
The Obsidian plugin needs that because it can’t read the Zotero database directly.
.bib files are also useful for using LaTeX, but that’s a separate topic.
Once you’ve create the bib file, you need to copy the path (the place you save the file) and paste that into the plugin settings in Obsidian. For Citations, there’s a field called Citation database path
In that menu you can also scroll down a bit, and set your desired Literature Note template. This can be as complicated or as simple as you wish.
In Obsidian template just means a prepared file that either you or another plugin pastes when you want to use it for something. Many people have a particular template they use everyday for their daily notes, that would include blank spaces for Things I did today or what I need to do tomorrow. In the context of citations, the Citations plugin actually does a pretty good job of explaining the possible “variables” we can use. So for instance, if you import the bibliographic information for a source by Shakespear, we could have a template that reads
Author: {{author}}
and then the plugin has a look in your .bib file, finds the author of the selected source, and then your note would say
Author: William Shakespeare
that’s all the term template really means.
What information is in your template really depends on what you’re doing or what you need.
A simple template to get you started could look like this
---
Authors: {{authorString}}
Title: "{{title}}"
Year: {{year}}
---
The --- at the start and end tell Obsidian that this is frontmatter which is just another word for a place to store metadata about file.
As for importing Notes themselves from your Zotero PDFs, that’s a bit more complicated.
The simplest way to do this would probably to mark and annotate a PDF in Zotero, then in the Notes section of the right toolbar, by Item Notes click the + to add all the annotations to a text file in Zotero, and then you can copy and paste those into your Obsidian note.
I just saw that the Zotero Integration automatically imports the annotations for you, so that might be worth a look.
If you have any questions, let me know.