Zotero standalone should become really stand alone

Currently, zotero standalone still needs a browser running with a plugin. I suggest a feature to allow a URL of an item to be pasted somewhere to have this item added without having a browser running. This would allow the use of browers other than chrome/firefox.

I am not sure about the technical implications. Maybe the plugin is used to run parser code in which case I understand that this would be an expensive feature. Otherwise I would appreciate if this feature request could be considered.
  • edited February 6, 2018
    You're aware there's a bookmarklet that you can use with any browser?

    https://www.zotero.org/downloadbookmarklet

    The bookmarklet isn't currently receiving any development time, but the basics hopefully still work, and it will likely be improved in the future.

    While it would be technically possible to support URLs in Add Item by Identifier, it wouldn't work in a lot of situations (gated resources, sites with bad URLs like EBSCOHost, etc.) and would generally make for a worse experience, so we're not inclined to add it.
  • I am aware of the bookmarklet. I am mainly interested in bibliographic entries, not web snapshots. My understanding is that bookmarklets would not help me there.

    Could you elaborate on the situations that do not work? Would the problem be that there are redirections to follow from URLs?

    I think that supporting doi-urls, and some major sites like arxiv, pubmed, jstor would cover a lot of ground.

    BTW zotero is a wonderful tool as it is, thanks for the effort.
  • I am mainly interested in bibliographic entries, not web snapshots. My understanding is that bookmarklets would not help me there.
    You have that exactly backwards, actually. The bookmarklet performs Zotero’s translator-based save process — that’s the reason to use it. (It probably doesn’t currently save webpages for which there are no Zotero translators, but if that’s the case that will likely be fixed in the not-too-distant future.)

    And based on my limited testing yesterday it still works fine.
  • edited February 7, 2018
    (You might be thinking of bookmarklets from other tools, which are much more limited. The Zotero bookmarklet should handle the vast majority of sites that the Zotero Connector handles (albeit with more limited attachment handling and no automatic rewriting of proxied URLs).)
Sign In or Register to comment.