Upgrade StorageNew item from PDF
If I add a PDF to my library and then "Retrieve Metadata" from the PDF and no metadata is detected then I would like to have the option to directly create a New Item (Book, Document, ...) with the PDF as attachment.
As it is now when no metadata is detected then I have to create a New Item which is empty, fill in title and so on manually and then select to add attachment (either "Stored copy.." or "Link to file..") and then delete the previously added PDF.
It would be simpler to be able to ctl-click on the PDF and have the option in the popup menu to "Add as Attachment to New Item...".
As it is now when no metadata is detected then I have to create a New Item which is empty, fill in title and so on manually and then select to add attachment (either "Stored copy.." or "Link to file..") and then delete the previously added PDF.
It would be simpler to be able to ctl-click on the PDF and have the option in the popup menu to "Add as Attachment to New Item...".
I just wrote up a little patch to add this to Zotero -- I don't know if it will make it into 2.1, but I don't see why not. I've also created a ticket for this.
I think a final solution will need more than this, though. If we're tying this into metadata retrieval, we might want to confirm with the user that parent items should be created, prompting for all failed items at the end of the metadata retrieval process. Otherwise 1) it's hard to notice what happened and 2) a temporarily failing lookup would create parents for all items (and there's no way, at least at present, to re-run metadata retrieval on child attachments).
The easiest fix that wouldn't require any real UI change would be to add PDFs to the file types supported by the existing "Create Parent Item from Selected Item" code.
As noted in the ticket and in the commit message for the r4701, a real solution would combine Create Parent Item... and PDF detection. I'll see about mocking-up something like that.
I would like to say that as a new user trying to organize a large collection of PDF articles and the like, the batch handling of failed items would be very welcome.
It seemed to me that perhaps when parent items are created in such cases they could be partially or approximately populated from the information that was extracted when searching online for proper metadata. It seemed to me also that as a fallback it might be possible to use the title of the PDF file - in my case I use a naming convention of author lastname(s) followed by " - " followed by the title.
A related consideration is that it would be very helpful when adding many PDFs to have the option of adding by link to file rather than ingesting the PDF into the Zotero DB. This would be similar to the iTunes option that allows the user to specify whether the files are copied into the iTunes media folder or not when adding them to iTunes. I have a very large collection of PDFs (40 GB) and don't really want to duplicate the storage. Such an option would, it seems, imply that "retrieve metadata for PDF" would have follow the link.
Thanks for such a helpful tool
Retrieve Metadata will work for linked items.
I was trying the link to file from a Document, Book etc and then didn't see the retrieve meta-data. The "Link to File" under the green plus sign works fine along with the retrieve metadata.
In the way that Zotero currently tries to identify PDFs, there is no such thing as approximate metadata-- if it finds a DOI, it creates an item using that. Otherwise, it uses a phrase from the article and searches Google Scholar-- if there's a match, it creates an item using that. Both of these are binary propositions -- we never have partial DOI-provided data (well, we do sometimes, but Zotero doesn't know that it's partial and happily creates an item anyway), and we don't have partial item data from Google (well, we do, but again Zotero doesn't know that and creates the item anyway). Zotero doesn't even try to guess what might be the journal name, article name, etc.
http://michel.bitbol.pagesperso-orange.fr/Autopoiesis.pdf
Since this points to an issue in the core DOI code, I'll be looking into this. Fortunately, it doesn't indicate any limitations in the PDF handling.
I'm not sure if individual pdfs, not attached to any metadata - actually sync. But provided they do:
Are you using File Syncing?
http://www.zotero.org/support/sync#file_syncing
If not - that's the problem.
If you are, are you using Zotero File Storage? If not, that's the problem - WebDAV sync doesn't allow for public file access.
If you have further questions, please start a new thread—this thread has nothing to do with your issue.
I was not able to figure out the patch created by ajlyo (Dec 25th 2010) that is supposed to enable this behavior. I just installed the lastest 2.1.1 Zotero and found it does not include this behavior "Create new item with PDF as attachment".
Is there a solution?
I'm quite stunned that this problem/request is not much much more common.
You probably don't want to apply a patch to Zotero yourself - it's not that hard, but it involves decompressing the .jar applying the patch and recompiling it - unless you feel inclined to tinker you probably don't want to get involved with that.