Many Citations, One PDF

adamgolding

What is the proper way to handle cases like where you have a single PDF of an encyclopedia, and need multiple citations, one for each article you're using? I'd rather not have to extract pages every time I come across a useful article in one of my encyclopedias..

Is there some way to make the various citations point to the same PDF, but make it open at a different page?

adamsmith

to the quesiton - no.

hierarchical items will be introduced at some point in the future (i.e. being able to link several items to one top-layer item). But that's going to be a while.

I don't have a good suggestion - maybe use the "related" function?

adamgolding

So what happens if you create two records linked to the same PDF? I haven't tried it for fear of corrupting my database, lol.. I imagine it might make Zotero more confused in the case where they're stored copies with the funny codenames than if they're files sitting elsewhere on the PC..

adamsmith

oh, you can absolutely link two items to the same file.
You could even store the copy with one item and link to that item from the other one if you want to. The links aren't affecting database integrity at all.

adamgolding

oh so, what is it you were saying you can't do, just the part about making it open to a specific page? Would that be a more trivial feature request? I'm not sure if most PDF programs support a parameter asking it to open to a certain page..

adamsmith

yes, the different page thing is what i meant - that might (!) be possible if zotero would integrate with one specific pdf reader, but it's pretty definitely not possible cross-platform cross-pdf reader.
I don't think it's at all trivial unfortunately. Most pdf functionality people have requested so far has not turned out to be possible in the foreseeable feature.

adamgolding

a user configurable paramater-passing scheme sent to the pdf reader, where the page number is available as a variable, would make it work for any reader that accepts such parameters, and then teh burden would be on pdf readers to support such parameters.. that's fairly trivial, no? Unless my DOS vintage means that I don't understand how windows programs call each other ;-)

noksagt

Appending '#page=NN' (where NN is the page number) will work for some browser plugins, including Adobe's. I assume it won't work for all of them & it won't work for the manual execution of most programs (which is not how Zotero uses PDFs anyway).

If you use the Acrobat plugin, you can type the address with the page reference into your location bar and use the "attach link to current page" to save the link to an item.