Dragging large PDFs

dbrear

I'm trying to drag 100MB+ pdfs into Zotero - they won't. They wouldn't individually either.

I had a group of five pdfs, totalling 789MB which Zotero ignored when I tried to drag them and drop into my collection. Once compressed, they drag and drop individually, no problem.

Is there a maximum size or something for a pdf? }

David

Matthew-hu

I've got several 300mb + pdfs that I have dragged into Zotero 6 without issue. I even have got 1GB + files to load okay, so I doubt that is the problem. Sometimes the indexing can take a long time and there seems like no response.

I have also had experience with poorly structured pdfs not loading correctly. Also check the type of pdf they are (i.e., PDF/A or another standard) and their image compression type. Sometimes recompressing them corrects the bad structures and puts them into an acceptable format. Another thing to know is that because Zotero uses the PDF.js for the pdf reader, it may be limited in how it handles image and compression types. For example, even though you may have a much smaller pdf file with JPEG2000 and JBIG2 compression, those are handled very slowly compared to JPEG, so the much larger JPEG image-pdf will render far faster in Zotero. This seems to be a native issue of PDF.js though, not Zotero.

dbrear

I should have said, this is the desktop version, 6.0.30. And I checked I had plenty of memory available.

Thanks Matthew, that's interesting. I don't use the built-in PDF reader, incidentally, but I appreciate you mention it due to the way Zotero handles files.

I wouldn't have thought half a dozen large files would all be badly structured. And as you say, 'there seems like no response'. I've mentioned before that a progress bar would be a good idea - or anything to show Zotero is actually working.