Export to replace original PDFs in Mendeley Library?

[mirenbz]

Hi,

Sorry for not having tested this before asking, but I don't want to break anything. I would like to add highlights to the ORIGINAL PDF file stored in my Mendeley library. Is is possible to use this tool to replace the original file (PDF with Mendeley annotations) with the new PDF (with embedded annotations)?

Thanks in advance!

[Xunius]

Hi mberasategi,

Sorry for the late reply.

If I understand you correctly, you could use this tool to help achieve that:
for individual PDFs, launch the GUI version, select the folder to process, toggle "Export PDFs", "Extract highlights" and "Extract notes", then export the PDFs to some folder, then in the "Files" field in the Mendeley sidebar of that document, point to the newly exported PDF file to use the file with embedded annotations.

for replacement of all PDFs in a folder, e.g. "myfolder", launch the GUI, toggle "Export PDFs", "Extract hightlights", "Extract notes" and "Export .ris", then process that folder and export to some place. Then in Mendeley, create a new folder, e.g. "myfolder_replace", hit the "add" button, point to the generated .ris file. It should then import the document entries in your old "myfolder" Mendeley folder, with PDFs that have annotations embedded in it (you can check that by right click a doc and "Open File Externally".

I would suggest give it a second check to see the new import got everything you need before deleting the old folder. And another word of warning that since now the annotations are embedded in the PDFs, you can't edit or delete them in Mendeley now.

Hope it helps