Tweaking Renaming Rules? In Zotfile Add on by Joscha

tomfjackson · September 9, 2013

Hi, Great add on, esp. for extracting annotations.
Question: I have a lot of newspaper articles from 1963 (writing a book on the year) and it would be useful to tweak the renaming to reflect my pre-existing format, which is YYYYMMDD_[newspaper code ie.NYT]_Author_Title. Is there a way to do this? That way I'll be able to add previously downloaded .pdfs from ProQuest to the new Zotero library that expands on this older research. Many thanks, Tom

adamsmith · September 10, 2013

not without patching Zotfile, no (and "patching" here also includes writing said patch).

tomfjackson · September 10, 2013

So who can I pay to do that? The only thing I've ever patched is a torn backpack where the critters got my trail mix.

adamsmith · September 10, 2013

First person to try would be Joscha, but since he did rather well (to understate things quite a bit - congratulations btw.) on the job market last year, monetary incentives are probably a lot less effective now than they would have been in the past.
If he can't do it, I can take a look (or maybe Gracile is interested? He's done more with Zotfile). It doesn't look terribly hard and my guess is that it would end up being only a dozen or so lines of code, but since I'd need to find my way in the code that has become quite long and complex, I wouldn't be able to do it on the cheap.
The other problem is that as long as its a custom patch it will need to be re-done on each Zotfile update, though that'd be quite little work.