Opening a file in viewer from outside of Zotero

fredcallaway

Is it possible to open a file in the Zotero reader from Finder or a script? Currently if you open a pdf with Zotero, it tries to import it as a new item.

The use case is opening files from a search (Spotlight or Alfred). A scripting solution would be fine for me, but I think it probably makes more sense to change the default behavior of opening a file with Zotero.

dstillman

You're talking about files that are already in Zotero, and you want to be able to do a search externally but open them as if you'd double-clicked on them within Zotero?

That's not possible directly, and I think it would be fairly weird behavior. We'll soon be making it possible to add PDFs to Zotero by opening them via the app, but I think overloading that with a second action would be messy and confusing. If you're in any groups, it will need to prompt for what library to add the PDF to, but then you have some convoluted dialog that forces you to choose between 1) adding the PDF to a particular library or 2) opening the PDF in one or more existing libraries where it might exist, based on matching the local file path against paths in the database.

The proper solution is opening Zotero items directly outside of Zotero, and there's an Alfred plugin that might be able to do that. (If not, the developer could easily add support for launching zotero://select or zotero://open-pdf links.) We don't currently have any plans for a Spotlight plugin for Zotero items, but that would also be an appropriate option for this.

fredcallaway

OK I see now why my suggested behavior doesn't make sense—I had an incorrect mental model of how files relate to items. Thanks for the help

For reference, my solution is to use the Alfred plugin, and then I can just press enter twice (once to jump to the item in Zotero, and again to open the pdf).