Add/edit pdf attachment link to its online source

nzeeders

Hi all,

When using the Zotero browser connector to add a PDF to Zotero, the added PDF is given a hyperlink to its online source automatically. This is a great feature, which I would like to use as well for manually added PDF documents. I could not find this feature, however.

Is there a way to add or edit PDF hyperlinks after the file was added to Zotero?
Can I request this feature or was it already?

Thanks

dstillman

That's not really the right way to think about this.

That field is just an auxiliary property on directly added attachments to show where they were downloaded from — it's often not even a permanent URL.

The URL field of the attachment's parent item should contain the canonical, citable URL for the source (e.g., the publisher's article page), and that page should provide access to the PDF in the appropriate way for the person viewing it. For most academic PDFs, Zotero will recognize the PDF automatically and create a parent item with a URL and/or DOI that takes you to the article page.

If it's just a random PDF document (e.g., some report) and there's no article page, you would just put the permanent PDF URL into the URL field of the parent item.

nzeeders

Thanks for your reply.

I can follow your line of thought. But actually I'm using Zotero a bit outside of its normal use case. In my case I'm not really interested in citations, but more in exporting entries and collections from Zotero to other tools. I use Zotero more as a resource management tool than a citation/bibliography tool. So in my case, I indeed want to add multiple PDF files to one parent item, even linked PDF files from a local drive. At the parent item level, I have only one URL option to use for all PDFs attached. It would be very useful if I could enter a URL for each PDF, so the attachment itself is local, but the URL points to some (related) web page.

Using a link in a PDF note would be an alternative for this which is already available, bit I think the URL would be more simple and neat.

Would it still interfere with the main Zotero use case if a PDF link was editable?