Quickly download missing PDFs

Hi all,

Sorry if this has been asked before, I could not find an answer in the forums.

I configured Zotero to not sync attachments, since I don't want to run out of storage in my zotero web library, and I don't care so much about maintaining a collection of pdfs in the cloud. When I sync between my machines, PDFs that I downloaded on my laptop for instance are not downloaded on my desktop (of course). But now let's say I want to download one of those PDFs on my desktop. Zotero shows a hollowed-out PDF icon and a hollowed-out child "fulltext pdf" attachment, signifying that I don't have the file locally. The child attachment metadata contains the URL for the pdf, but I don't see a quick way of downloading the PDF and associating it with the parent object. I'm sure I can just visit the URL, download the PDF manually, and then attach it to the parent somehow, but this is kinda messy. Since Zotero has all of the information needed to automate this process, I'm imagining there's a way to do it?

Thanks in advance for any help.
  • I don't think there's a way to do this (without custom coding) -- if you have the PDF item attached, Zotero assumes (plausibly) that you actually have the PDF, so there's no quick way to get to this (other than, of course, syncing the attached PDF).

    There is "Find Available PDF" on parent items, but a) that's less reliable than what you have in mind and b) it's disabled for items that already have a PDF.
  • Thanks for the quick reply. I'll look into custom coding it when I have a chance.

    I'm still confused about something though -- is this use case that I'm describing really not a common one? I would imagine there's many times where a user might want to share the attachments of a select few items with other machines without syncing the whole library.
  • Yes, I think it's quite rare to use Zotero across multiple machines without some mode of file sync (wether that's Zotero storage, webDAV, or a synced, linked file folder).
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