[5.0 Beta] How to save local attachemnts via the new browser connector?

cheflo

I am using Firefox with the new Zotero5 connector. As of now, in order to save the pdf of an article to my local storage directory, I have to have the desktop Zotero interface open while clicking the connector icon. With the old zotero connector, it was possible to save articles with just one click of the button which was very convenient (nowadays, my "workflow" usually ends up as find interesting article -> click connector icon -> realize desktop application is not open -> open desktop application -> click connector icon -> wait for article to download -> close desktop application because I will be reading the article later.

Are there any plans to change this and allow the zotero connector to save PDFs to a local directory without having to launch the desktop application manually? If it is not possible for the connector to save into the local attachment directory directly, could there be a Zotero daemon which was launched at boot, and communicated with the connector? Or that the next time Zotero was launched it would download the PDFs for the items saved by the connector directly to zotero.org (although the user might not be on the same internet connection so this could be problematic).

adamsmith

The way Zotero Standalone is intended is that you keep it running and don't keep starting and closing it down. It's not very resource intensive. You could even just open it at startup. That's effectively what you did when running Zotero in Firefox anyway.

The way Zotero translators work, they do require the app to run in order to run translators locally (otherwise they're run server side). The PDF download is only the most visible sign of this, btw. Translators perform better when run locally than when run on the server (i.e. there are a whole number that don't work without Standalone running).

So, short answer -- not of those are likely to happen. (There may be, entirely unrelated to this, an option to download PDFs for items in your library; there's some code for this, but no ETA for implementation).

cheflo

Thanks for the quick reply.
If the only way to launch Zotero is with the gui running, I guess I can bind a hotkey to launching it on another virtual desktop, and then another hotkey for closing it. When running and not in focus, zotero sits around 3% CPU and memory usage, and I also try to have as few application open as possible to reduce clutter and the time it takes switching between them, so I will probably not leave it open all the time.