Meaning of UI icons?

nrbarr

So I just installed Zotero, and synced with the lab group I'm collaborating with. I immediately have one question: What's the meaning of the different icons in what I assume is the attachment column of the interface? There's a small white-with-blue-outline dot, that then turns into a large grey dot, and then that turns into a small blue dot, all without any explanation of what that actually means. Is there something somewhere that goes through each UI element and explains what it's there for, what it indicates?

bwiernik

For the attachment column, the blue dot indicates that the item has an attachment that is downloaded and available, the blue outline indicates that the item has an attachment that is not yet downloaded/available (if the item is stored on the Zotero servers, it will download when you try to open it), the gray dot is a progress bar indicating that the download is in process (it will start as an empty circle and fill as the file is downloaded), and an empty column indicates that the item has no attachment.

FLSBLibrary

Other icon questions:

Some of my records have a faint document page icon preceding the title
Some records have a PDF icon
Some records have a hyperlink icon

All seem to have PDFs attached that I can open, but can you explain the different images? Thanks!

adamsmith

PDF icon = attached PDF (i.e. stored in Zotero's data folder)
Hyperlink icon = linked PDF (i.e. stored somewhere else on your harddisk and linked to Zotero)
faint document page = typically a snapshot of a webpage? That one shouldn't be a PDF.

FLSBLibrary

Thanks for the quick reply.

Confused why the hyperlinked icon is appearing...I am dragging thousands of PDF files into Zotero, so why do the resulting titles appear with these various, different icons?

And the faint document pages do open as a PDF. There are lots of these icons...they have a little arrow in front of each one and if you click on it, you see the PDF icon below.

As for another difference between the icons, it looks like the faint doc page icons were digitally published articles and these resulted in having attached metadata. The ones with just the PDF icon look to be mostly scanned articles, and so no metadata.

bwiernik

You seem to be confusing attachments from proper Zotero items:

For regular Zotero items (i.e., the items with metadata that you can expand with the arrow, not standalone attachments https://www.zotero.org/support/attaching_files#child_versus_standalone_attachment_files), the icon will indicate the type of item (e.g., Journal Article, Thesis, Patent, Book, etc.).

adamsmith

Oh, OK so these are different item types in Zotero, corresponding to the item type shown on the left.