Zotero Highlight Collector turns Zotero PDF highlights into a personal research dataset. Map highlight colors to meanings such as Vocabulary, Core Claim, Quote, Method, Conclusion, or Idea, and the plugin will collect matching annotations with source metadata for filtering and export.

Status: early MVP. Tested locally with Zotero 9 during development.

• Listen for new or modified Zotero PDF highlight annotations.
• Map each watched highlight color to a category.
• Record category, highlight text, paper title, excerpt date, annotation comment translation, context sentence, and page label.
• Show a unified Highlight Dataset panel from Zotero's Tools menu.
• Edit color-to-category mappings in the panel.
• Filter records by category.
• Configure visible/exported fields.
• Export the dataset as CSV.
• Export Anki-friendly tab-separated text for vocabulary review.
• Store data locally in Zotero preferences.

This plugin works locally inside Zotero. It does not upload your papers, annotations, vocabulary, translations, highlights, or metadata to any external service.

See PRIVACY.md for details.

1. Download the latest .xpi from GitHub Releases.
2. Open Zotero.
3. Go to Tools -> Add-ons.
4. Click the gear icon.
5. Choose Install Add-on From File....
6. Select the downloaded .xpi.
7. Restart Zotero.

1. Open a PDF in Zotero.
2. Highlight text using a color that you mapped to a research category.
3. Open Tools -> Highlight Collector: Show Dataset.
4. Review captured highlights, edit color/category mappings, filter by category, or export CSV/Anki text.

You can choose your own system. A common setup is:

This plugin does not translate text by itself. It reads Zotero annotation comments and stores them as the Translation field.

If you use a Zotero Translate / PDF Translate plugin, enable the option that automatically fills translations into annotation comments. Then this plugin can capture both the highlighted text and its translation.

The Anki export is a tab-separated .txt file with three fields:

Front    Back    Tags

When importing into Anki, choose a note type with at least two fields, map Front to the word/phrase and Back to the combined category, translation/context/source content. The third field can be imported as tags.

Install dependencies:

npm ci

Build the plugin:

npm run build

The XPI is generated at:

.scaffold/build/zotero-highlight-collector.xpi

Create a GitHub release and upload the generated XPI, or push a version tag to run the included release workflow.

• Scan existing highlights on demand.
• Jump from a dataset row back to the source annotation.
• Improve context extraction using annotation position/page text.
• Add richer export templates, such as literature review CSV and quote bank Markdown.

Bootstrapped from windingwind/zotero-plugin-template.