Decide which child file to open by default

linaewen18

Hi!

I have a few files for which I have two pdf attached (eg the paper and its supplementary information).
Is there a way to change the one opened by default by Zotero when I double-click on the reference?
I tried to rename the child files but it did not change anything.

Thanks in advance for your help!

bwiernik

Not at this time, sorry. PDF attachments will open in the order attached to the Zotero item.

dsholmes

This feature is needed! This problem also occurs when there are draft versions with comments that need to be kept.

Suggested:
R-click on document > Manage Attachments > Set as default

krueschan

@bwiernik wrote: "PDF attachments will open in the order attached to the Zotero item."

This does not seem to be correct. I detached all child items except the "desired default pdf" (DDPDF) from their parent (which correctly caused the DDPDF to be opened upon double click), and then re-attached the other child items. This restored the previous, unwanted, opening behaviour.

It appears that rather than the order in which they were attached to the parent, it seems that the order in which they were added to the zotero library is what matters. I believe this to be the case because in a second attempt, I removed the non-DDPDF child items, and then didn't reattach them, but rather attached copies of their files (which I easily obtained by selecting "show file" from the context menu) (to save space, I then deleted the old, now duplicate, child items. This resulted in the desired behaviour, but is cumbersome.

dstillman

@krueschan: Yes, bwiernik just meant that it's the order that you save attachments to an item in your library, not that you can change this by moving attachments out of and back onto the item. It's just about the age of the attachment.

It will be possible to set a different primary attachment in a future version.

b0c5

> It will be possible to set a different primary attachment in a future version.

By future version you mean Zotero 7 ?

jeremyvancleve

> It will be possible to set a different primary attachment in a future version.

looking forward to it!

b0c5

Seems this option is not yet available in Zotero 7.

b0c5

This was recently requested again: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/123009/set-default-file-to-open/p1

> It will be possible to set a different primary attachment in a future version.

Is it planned to appear in some minor release of the 7.x series?

EscPhilip

Indeed still interested in this too.
Best regards

ctm500

There have been a few websites (e.g., scienceDirect) where many times I have to manually download a published PDF and the default becomes a snapshot or a PMC / less-well-typeset version that Zotero can grab - I might seem nitpicky, but sometimes the open access PDFs have something irritating like figures all at the end of the PDF. Moreover, this means that if I have a professionally-typeset PDF, I have to manually remove the open-access version in order for my zotero-synced android ereader to default to looking at the good PDF.

Not a dealbreaker, this is still an awesome workflow, but it seems like an easy fix for a big quality-of-life improvement.

Daniel.A6

Just bumped into this problem.

I think @dsholmes suggestion above would work.

But I'll add another suggestion: a way to quickly see if there's more than one PDF under an entry. As it stands, looking at each entry I don't know if there's only one, or more, PDFs under it.

This could be shown in the attachments column, for example, by have two overlaping PDF items instead of one (to denote a group). Though there may be better ways to do it. Maybe a number showing how many (PDF) attachments there are for each entry.

b0c5

Hello, any news on whether this feature will be available?

I now have a strange situation, where for an item in my library, my iPad insists on opening a supplementary file by default, whereas on Mac the default item is the main text (as it should). I have tried removing the supplementary PDF, and re-adding it again, but without success. My iPad keeps insisting on opening the supplementary PDF file (whenever it is available) for this item by default.