downloading epubs as well as PDFs

hhng

I noticed Science Direct (and a few other sites) is offering epubs as well as PDFs now. I would like to be able to automatically download the epubs along with the PDFs. right now it only looks for PDFs to automatically download. As for the reason why I would like this feature, epubs are nicer on an ereader compared to PDFs.

Sorry if this feature is already available, I tried searching and looking around but I couldn't find anything regarding epubs.

Cheers

adamsmith

I haven't looked at this in detail, but technically this is probably feasible with very little extra effort where the epub is offered.

I'm wondering, though, how to best handle this logistically. We definitely don't want to do this automatically for all users, of course.

We could add an extra preference, and right now that seems like the only option to me, but there are already so many preferences, especially on that screen, not sure how Dan would feel about this.

hhng

Hi Adam, thanks for the quick response. I also think this should be a preference that users would have to opt-in.

In my opinion, however, I don't think that there are that many preferences. I think this option could be under General --> Miscellaneous where the options for PDFs and snapshots are currently

aurimas

I know we don't like this phrase a lot, but this should probably be a hidden preference. It could be like preferEPub (or something more generic, which means that you prefer an e-reader format over pdf) and the translator would choose which one to download. It could be similar to the ACS hidden preference, where you can select to either get one over the other or get both. Thus may turn out to be popular enough to make it into a user-visible preference.

hhng

I don't really like this "hidden feature" concept. If a feature is available, then I think the user should be able to control it and not have to jump through hoops to get to it. I understand not wanting the user to be overwhelmed with options, but a solution could be to have a Simple Preference Panel and an Advance Preference Panel.

aurimas

There are way too many preferences to fit into a simple Preferences window and if you keep cramming more and more into it, then it becomes no better than the current "hidden" preference interface. Think of hidden preferences as the advanced advanced tab, except you access it through Preferences -> Advanced -> about:config

adamsmith

I'm not happy with this either way.
I completely agree with aurimas that the preferences are already getting out of hand: We have 8 tabs, two of them with 2 subtabs. On the other hand, hidden preferences are really quite inaccessible and, well, hidden.

I wonder whether there is a better way to design this in the preferences so that it's really one preferences with multiple checkboxes, something like
Automatically attach
-----PDFs
-----Snapshots*
-----Suplementary Data
-----Epubs

*those are currently only optional for webpage items, we could/should reconsider.

aurimas

There are more choices to consider though:

• Format: PDF, HTML, PS, e-book (epub, pdb, mobi, etc)...
• Quality: high-res/low-res
• Size: less than x MB
• Supplementary Data Format: PDFs, videos, archives, docs, spreadsheets...
• Attaching as links or downloading the files

Most of these should be a ranked order of preference (e.g. download HTML version but only if PDF is not available).

Gets kind of complicated

hhng

Adam, I currently have 7 tabs with 3 having subtabs, is there another tab I am missing?

I personally like being able to control my software, but I understand, however, that most users would prefer a simple preference panel. I guess the request is "simple" but the implementation on how to do it efficiently may be more complicated. Anyways, I hope some sort of solution will be implemented in future updates.

adamsmith

Zotero for Firefox has an extra tab for Proxies.