Preview PDF's in full-text search

helohe

Zotero allows indexing of pdf documents and full text searching them. But it would be great if zotero would show a small preview of the place(s) in each document where the searched terms are found. Similar as it is done in google books.

hollysully

I second this request. The only reason I have not fully switched from Mendeley is that I frequently use this feature in Mendeley to understand how a search term is being used in each paper. Often I cannot remember a specific paper that I want, but I can remember a particular phrase in the paper, and I use search along with the preview feature to quickly find the paper that I want.

adamsmith

That's been planned for a long time and Zotero actually "knows" the surrounding text of search results under the hood.
My understanding it's getting closer, but probably not exactly imminent.

klavs

I second the initial request and completely agree with hollysully: I would like to switch to Zotero, but Mendeley search gives the preview of the results which makes the searching so much easier because it gives answer as to where the search string is located. In Zotero I have to guess which is much less nicer. Hopefully Zotero will fix this any time soon. I.e., it is already 8 years since the first post here

acharkq

I agree that this will be an extremely useful feature, particularly for recalling a phrase or sentence during writing.