Pane for previewing PDF attachment of item currently under cursor

z8080

Hello

Would it be possible to add a pane to Zotero (when it is in Fullscreen mode) that previews the PDF attachment of the item that the cursor is currently on? This would be very useful as people sometimes remember a paper visually, based on what its first page looked like, and if you had such a pane you could just very quickly scroll through several papers and find the one you had in mind, rather than having to open attachments for each and every paper.

This feature exists in Papers (Mac platform) and it would look great in Zotero!

Thanks!

adamsmith

I don't believe there is a cross-platform preview capability for pdfs comparable to the one Papers uses for Mac, so the answer is no.
That said, have a look at ZoteroQuickLook for improved pdf previewing capabilities
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/zoteroquicklook/

ajlyon

See http://www.zotero.org/support/plugins -- specifically ZoteroQuickLook (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/111142/).

z8080

Thanks - unfortunately that addon is not useful at all, it takes less time to manually open each attachment than to use the addon! :)

By the way, I wasn't suggesting that this feature be implemented in Zotero across platforms. Personally I use Windows but I just noticed how a colleague that uses Papers had that nice preview function.

adamsmith

Zotero doesn't implement features that just work on one platform - that would entail an unsustainable degree of maintenance and would cancel out the benefits of having a program that works across platforms.
Someone interested might be able to write a mac plugin to do this - if quicklook doesn't work quickly on windows, though, I doubt this could at this time be possible on your platform (on mac and linux, the pdf previews with quicklook are instantaneous).

adamsmith

For what it's worth, calling software provided for free to you by volunteers "very badly written" isn't very nice... it's perfectly fine to say that you don't find it useful and why, but unless you actually have insights pertaining to the coding, you shouldn't judge it (especially, as in this case, as I point out above, the problem is most likely with Windows and the 3rd party tool used to generate the preview, and not with the quicklook plugin).

mronkko

ZoteroQuickLook is almost identical to Papers Quicklook and they both probably use the same programming interface available on OS X. A similar programming interface is not available on Windows and this makes it very difficult to develop a good quicklook feature on that platform. If something like OS X QuickLook will be available in future versions of Windows or someone points me to a plugin that will do quicklook in Windows, that will be implemented in ZoteroQuickLook.

Here is a video of Papers Quicklook
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fmqr0HCE9CQ&;

Here is a video of ZoteroQuickLook
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu3p5BBtkvE

(The zotero quicklook video is pretty bad quality, but I have been too lazy to make a better one.)