file sync uncompressed PDFs

amacom73

My group is hoping to use Zotero as a unified ref manager and library organizer. File syncing is important for this, and I love Zotero as a unified solution, and love the idea of losing EndNote for good (and good riddance).

What we'd really like to do is have the Zotero-organized PDFs on our WebDAV server directly linkable by URL from our group wiki or a simple file listing in a browser. Is there any way to have PDF compression turned off so we can view the PDFs outside of Zotero? Maybe even to have the original file names of the PDFs preserved? ZIpping the files in the first place seems like an odd choice--if a PDF is a MB or few, and my University give us 5GB, that's thousands of uncompressed PDFs.

Thanks!
Andy

dstillman

There's currently no way to turn off the zipping, but we'll likely be adding an uncompressed sync option in the not-too-distant future.

krueschan

amacom73, regarding "zipping the files in the first place seems like an odd choice":
you will have to keep in mind that a) pdf files vary hugely in size - I have pdfs from tens of KB to hundreds of MB b) attachment type is not limited to pdf; e.g. I personally have a few audio and video sources (granted; they don't zip very well, but who knows what other users attach to their items) and c) one good reason for zipping is preservation of file time and date as some webDAV servers will set the file modified time to the upload time which could potentially cause problems with syncing (and even if it didn't - you would lose the original last modified date when downloading the files again).

Having said that, I agree that it would be useful to be able to have an option to switch off compression per file type or globally and to have transparent naming of files and folders in the webDAV store to allow access from outside zotero. (what about creating an index.htm file in the root directory of the sync store containing a table with the main bibliographic informations of and links to the files stored within? if that folder is web accessible, this would be a very useful (and easy to implement) tool to refind documents)

amacom73

point taken, krueschan. that's a convincing case for file compression.

I have thought of a workaround for the PDF thing in the meantime, which is basically to independently upload the PDFs to a directory of our server and point to them from within zotero items. This is more useful for our backlog of pre-zotero PDFs than as a long term solution, but it also allows transparent file naming and keeps the Z database lean and mean. One can then turn off file syncing, which in my experience is a bit balky anyway at the moment.

another alternative to your suggestion would be to be able to export the whole Z database, including attachments, to a set of html files for server upload and web access. this is similar in concept to the zotz plugin, but would need to include PDFs for it to be useful to me. one could imagine doing a weekly or monthly library export to one's web server.