I’m making a coursepack for my fall class in Obsidian. It’ll have useful features, tools, and templates for doing the work I want them to do.

I want students to use Zotero to keep track of their readings and annotations. I’ve been playing with https://github.com/mgmeyers/obsidian-zotero-integration and have now got it where I want it, more or less. Now that I’ve got it set up, students just have to download my vault and turn off safe mode, and everything’ll be configured. For reference, this is what I did:
– add it via the community plugins
– create a new note for your template.
– use this template for your notes: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/zotero-desktop-connector-import-templates/36310/2?u=drgraham
– the ‘css snippet’ is a text file with .css extension in the .obsidian/snippets folder; you can tell obsidian to read the snippet from the ‘appearance’ settings
– in the template itself, the hex values for colour did not agree with the colours being used by my version of zotero (maybe somewhere in zotero you can set those?)
– Here’re mine:
“`
{%- macro colorValueToName(color) -%}
{%- switch color -%}
{%- case “#a28ae5” -%}
Relevant / important
{%- case “#ff6666” -%}
Disagree
{%- case “#ffd400” -%}
Questions / confusion
{%- case “#5fb236” -%}
Agree
{%- case “#2ea8e5” -%}
Definitions / concepts
{%- default -%}
Interesting but not relevant
{%- endswitch -%}
{%- endmacro -%}
“`
In the settings for the zotero integration, I turned on the insert citekeys from the @ symbol, and I renamed note import to be ‘extract your notes from an item’. I have it create new notes in a folder called `zotero-notes`. I added the @ symbol in front of the filename template – which uses bibtex cite key- so that my extracted annotation notes all follow the pattern @graham2006 etc. Useful for eventual pandoc integration.

Use the colours in Zotero to indicate _why_ you’re highlighting something.

Yellow – Questions/confusion
Red – Disagree
Green – Agree
Blue – Definitions / concepts
Purple – Important

cmd + p to open the command pallette
look for ‘**zotero – extract your notes from an item’**.
wait a few moments for the zotero selector to appear.
search for and select the item that you were annotating within zotero
a new note will appear in the zotero-notes folder
you can then refactor (use the ‘note composer’ command) the one big note into several small ones. Alternatively, in a brand new note you can link to the note and use the ^ symbol to link to a particular annotation.

If you have zotero on an ipad, and you have some kind of shared folder accessible between your computer and the ipad, there seems to be a glitch. Anything you annotate on your ipad in a shared folder needs to be moved to your main ‘my library’ on your computer, and then deleted from the shared folder. Otherwise you’ll get an error when you go to extract the annotations.