Exporting files

mronkko
Zotero has currently the ability to export files from saved search. However, I think that with a couple of changes this feature would be even more useful.

1) Instead of prompting for a directory export the files to a temporary folder and open it in Explorer/Finder/File manager

2) Instead of putting the files of each article to a separate folder put all files to a single folder

3) Choose what type of files to export (e.g. PDFs only)

I have two use cases for this. The first is to just generate a collection of papers and easily email that to a colleague. The second is to browse a collection of PDFs with cover flow view. As far as I know, these are not easily possible with other reference management software and are probably not difficult to implement to Zotero.

Mikko
  • dstillman
    There's not really any need to use a temporary folder. You can already open individual files without exporting, and you'd have to manually delete a temporary folder after you were done with it anyway.

    On OS X, you can export multiple files without parent folders just by dragging them to the filesystem. (On Windows you can only export single files this way.)

    Even with regular export, though, you can use built-in system functionality to do what you want. On OS X, if you want to use Cover Flow, just do a search in the exported directory (or the 'storage' folder directly if you want to view all attachments). While you may be able to alter the saved search in Zotero to search only for PDFs (depending on the exact search you need to do), you can also do this from the OS X search by including kind:pdf (or kind:html, etc.).
  • mronkko
    I understand that the current set of features make this kind of possible. However, it is not a practical solution to the use case that I would like to achieve.

    I often search through my collection of PDFs using Finder and then Cover Flow. The advantage of this approach is that I identify the right article much faster by seeing the front pages of the PDFs than by reading a list of article data.

    If I want to do this with the artiles stored in a particular Zotero collection I would need to
    1) Create a new folder
    2) Export the collection to this folder
    3) Type the search string kind:pdf in Finder
    4) Browse the articles with Cover Flow

    How I would like to see this working is
    1) I choose "Open in Finder" from the context menu of a collection

    Then zotero would create a new directory in /tmp, export the PDFs to this folder and open it in Finder

    Another approach that would achieve the same end would be for Zotero to maintain a directory structure that would contain copies or (symbolic) links to the PDFs in the main data directory. This directory structure would then be organized similarly to collections.

    When I have some spare time at work, I might give it a shot to code either of these as a Zotero plugin. If I decide to do so, what is the most appropriate place to ask technical questions about how Zotero works?

    Mikko

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