Let me jump in real quick and ask something slightly related.
The "Linked Attachment Base Directory" can be used to access the same library on two different computers, even if the files are stored in a cloud service.
Would it not be possible to do the same between a computer and a tablet?
Zotero developers and people at the Corporation for Digital Scholarship do a fantastic job with this; the Tropy app is also unbelievable. Still, the problem with the syncing process is that many people (me included) already pay for a cloud storage service (in my case, iCloud) because it syncs everything: photos, music, etc., including our PDFs. I have a 2T iCloud account, which is more than enough for my whole family and me, including my wife, who's also an academic. The point is that to use Zoter across devices - an iPad, for instance - and still work with it the same way we do on our notebooks, we have to subscribe to the Zotero cloud service as well. Don't get me wrong; if I were already a professor, I'd gladly do so! But as a PhD student, funds are hard to come by.
Of course, there are workarounds. I could use the Apple PDF reader inside the Finder app on the iPad, do my reading and annotations there, and then sync everything to the PC, and then it will appear in Zotero. But it would still be nice to use the same workflow across devices and have the annotations always editable etc.
So after this whole "argument", the point is, can't we use the "Linked Attachment Base Directory" to sync across tablets and notebooks given that the folder structure, because of the cloud storage service, is exactly the same?
The mobile apps support stored files synced via Zotero Storage or WebDAV. They don't and won't support linked files.
We accepted a patch for the Linked Attachment Base Directory functionality years ago due to the popularity of ZotFile and have maintained it (and tried to make it more forgiving of mistakes), but given that a plugin-based linked-file workflow is an advanced, error-prone setup that we don't provide support for, and given that Zotero itself never automatically creates linked files, it's not something we have any plans to support on new platforms.
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Let me jump in real quick and ask something slightly related.
The "Linked Attachment Base Directory" can be used to access the same library on two different computers, even if the files are stored in a cloud service.
Would it not be possible to do the same between a computer and a tablet?
Zotero developers and people at the Corporation for Digital Scholarship do a fantastic job with this; the Tropy app is also unbelievable. Still, the problem with the syncing process is that many people (me included) already pay for a cloud storage service (in my case, iCloud) because it syncs everything: photos, music, etc., including our PDFs. I have a 2T iCloud account, which is more than enough for my whole family and me, including my wife, who's also an academic. The point is that to use Zoter across devices - an iPad, for instance - and still work with it the same way we do on our notebooks, we have to subscribe to the Zotero cloud service as well. Don't get me wrong; if I were already a professor, I'd gladly do so! But as a PhD student, funds are hard to come by.
Of course, there are workarounds. I could use the Apple PDF reader inside the Finder app on the iPad, do my reading and annotations there, and then sync everything to the PC, and then it will appear in Zotero. But it would still be nice to use the same workflow across devices and have the annotations always editable etc.
So after this whole "argument", the point is, can't we use the "Linked Attachment Base Directory" to sync across tablets and notebooks given that the folder structure, because of the cloud storage service, is exactly the same?
We accepted a patch for the Linked Attachment Base Directory functionality years ago due to the popularity of ZotFile and have maintained it (and tried to make it more forgiving of mistakes), but given that a plugin-based linked-file workflow is an advanced, error-prone setup that we don't provide support for, and given that Zotero itself never automatically creates linked files, it's not something we have any plans to support on new platforms.