Emailing citations with PDFs

jeff698

I frequently email citations with the attached PDFs to colleagues. Sharing libraries with them is a non-starter, they just need the PDF and will never deal with a Zotero library.

I've tried dragging and dropping into macOS mail.app and the macOS version of Outlook 365, neither of which work. It just ignores me when I drag either citations or PDFs to the email.

This is one of the most fundamental things I need a reference manager to do Bookends does it very well. Please tell me there is an easy way to do this in Zotero?

Thanks.

jeff698

Update: I can make this work using QuickCopy but ONLY if I have HTML selected in both Zotero preferences and in the email client I'm trying to use.

Because HTML option wasn't defaulted in Zotero, drag and drop with QuickCopy wasn't working for me.

dstillman

That doesn't sound right — you should be able to drag into any text field, and on Big Sur I have no problem dragging into Mail or using Cmd-Shift-C, with Mail set to either rich-text or plain-text mode.

"Copy as HTML" shouldn't matter here. That only affects plain-text drags — it puts copies raw HTML code as plain text instead of copying it as HTML — and Mail.app doesn't accept plain text. Even when you switch Mail.app to plain-text mode, it seems to use the HTML on the clipboard and convert it to plain text, instead of using the plain text on the clipboard. (You can see the actual text output by pasting into TextEdit in plain-text mode, where you'll get HTML code if "Copy as HTML" is checked.)

dstillman

@jeff698: Note that the above is for citations. Mail won't accept files from Zotero directly, but you can click the paperclip icon and then drag an attachment directly from Zotero to the open dialog, which will select the file in question within the Zotero data directory, and then add that file. (The same would work in any Mac file dialog.)

You can drag Zotero attachments directly to at least Gmail and Thunderbird without needing to drag to the file dialog.