Upgrade StoragePick2anki: look up words in the PDF/EPUB reader and save them to Anki as cards
I built a small plugin for my own literature reading and thought it might be useful to others.
What it does: select an English word or phrase in Zotero's built-in reader → a panel appears in the selection popup with aggregated definitions from five online dictionaries (Youdao, Bing, Cambridge, Oxford Advanced Learner's, Collins) → one click sends the word to Anki via AnkiConnect, with the sentence it appeared in as the card's context.
How it differs from Translate for Zotero: they are complementary — that plugin translates sentences for comprehension, this one collects vocabulary cards. Both append to the same selection popup, so they can be enabled together.
Requirements: Zotero 7+ (tested on 10.0.1). Dictionary lookup needs nothing else; writing cards needs Anki desktop with the AnkiConnect add-on (default 127.0.0.1:8765). No accounts, no API keys.
Privacy: the only network calls are to the five dictionary sites and their audio CDNs when you look a word up, plus a local request to AnkiConnect when you save a card. No telemetry, no uploads of your library or reading data. Dictionary pages are parsed for personal study use only.
Install / source (MIT): https://github.com/soyami/zotero-pick2anki — the .xpi is in the latest release; Tools → Plugins → Install Plugin From File.
Feedback and bug reports are welcome (GitHub issues, or reply here).
What it does: select an English word or phrase in Zotero's built-in reader → a panel appears in the selection popup with aggregated definitions from five online dictionaries (Youdao, Bing, Cambridge, Oxford Advanced Learner's, Collins) → one click sends the word to Anki via AnkiConnect, with the sentence it appeared in as the card's context.
How it differs from Translate for Zotero: they are complementary — that plugin translates sentences for comprehension, this one collects vocabulary cards. Both append to the same selection popup, so they can be enabled together.
Requirements: Zotero 7+ (tested on 10.0.1). Dictionary lookup needs nothing else; writing cards needs Anki desktop with the AnkiConnect add-on (default 127.0.0.1:8765). No accounts, no API keys.
Privacy: the only network calls are to the five dictionary sites and their audio CDNs when you look a word up, plus a local request to AnkiConnect when you save a card. No telemetry, no uploads of your library or reading data. Dictionary pages are parsed for personal study use only.
Install / source (MIT): https://github.com/soyami/zotero-pick2anki — the .xpi is in the latest release; Tools → Plugins → Install Plugin From File.
Feedback and bug reports are welcome (GitHub issues, or reply here).
This is super helpful!
My only quandry is that the settings page only shows Mandarin characters - it would be nice to have a clearly displayed English option.
Also, in order to only see English explanations you need to remove all databases except Cambridge and Oxford - I thought you could automate this step for those of us just using the tool to get quick definitions.