"Save to Zotero" - with or without associated pdf

adrianlupascu
Currently the "Save to Zotero" button in Firefox will either save or not pdf files associated with a specific page/article depending on a setting under Edit ->Preferences->General->File Handling.
I would find it useful for the "Save to Zotero" to come in two versions, with and without saving attachments. I was wondering whether such a solution exists or is being considered.
Thank you in advance for your answer.
  • dstillman
    The plan here was to include some of those saving options in the context menu of the Save to Zotero button, so you'd be able to quickly toggle those settings without going back to Zotero, and they'd also apply when saving directly to the online library. You can see an example with "Include Snapshots", but there would be other options.

    This would take the place of the "with snapshot" and "without snapshot" options that already appear for webpage saving. Expanding this to PDFs and possibly tags, it wouldn't work to show all possible combinations of settings for each translator.

    But I wonder if we can do better, since having to toggle settings before saving would still be fairly annoying. It might be possible to allowing some of these things to be toggled from the save popup. (You can switch the target between a library that allows file attachments and one that doesn't, so Zotero already has logic to add or remove files after the translation process has started.) But we'd need to do some UI work to see if we could integrate these options into the popup without making it overly complicated.
  • adrianlupascu
    Thank you for the reply! I realize now that right clicking the "Save to Zotero" button gives some options and I also see how exposing all these multiple options can be tedious. Thinking about my standard workflow again - the ideal for me would be to have one button that saves with pdf attachment and one that saves without pdf attachment,but I dont know whether this is realistic. (I find it useful to not save pdfs for some of the papers I collect before I have a chance to go over the entries in more detail.)
  • dstillman
    It's not possible for extensions to create multiple toolbar buttons (and I don't think it would be a good solution for this in any case, since it would be both redundant and overly limited).

    If we can get the UI right, I think making these things toggleable from the active save popup is going to be our best option. Failing that, toggling these options from the context menu before saving would at least be an improvement over the status quo.
  • dsholmes
    Suggestion for a solution to this problem, which I also need very much. Currently, I have to check the setting before every "Save to Zotero" to make sure it is what I want this time. I need an indicator either on the "Save to Zotero" icon or on the Zotero interface.

    Add a toggle control to the Zotero "My Library" tab. On: attaches associated files. Off: does not. Click the toggle control to change the setting.

    Alternative: In the Connector (Chrome, etc.), have the icon show the setting, perhaps with or without a down arrow. Perhaps even allow the setting to be toggled by right-clicking on the icon and selecting a choice to toggle the setting.

    In this would clutter the interface for typical users, make it an option.
    In Zotero settings, under "Automatically attach associated PDFs and other files when saving items", provide an option to "Display toggle control".
  • bamelbourne
    +1 for this functionality. I only need to collect pdfs for papers that I want to annotate. The others I'll read online. It's super painful to toggle via preferences currently.
  • megra
    Agree. The right-click options that are currently given on the Firefox connector aren't very helpful to me; a with or without pdf option would be much more appreciated!
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