Saving PDF's Right to Zotero

paully wally
This is similar to other questions in this forum. Example: In Google I click on a site called "Seven Things You need to About Zotero". It is a PDF. It gives me the option to "Save File" or "Open with" Preview.

How do I save this PDF right to Zotero? If I open in Preview, I don't see how to save it to Zotero, or "Open With" either. I even tried "Open With" another program like Zotero, but it got hung up and wouldn't send it there.

The whole point here is to keep the clutter down, so I don't want to save it in Documents in Finder, then have to slide it over in Zotero, thus having it in two places.
Thanks!
  • mronkko
    Zotero 3.0 should give you an option to save directly to Zotero. (Assuming you are using Firefox.)
  • paully wally
    I believe I did download Zotero 3.0, but I don't see this option. I have the standalone version. Does this matter? Thanks.
  • adamsmith
    yes, that option is Zotero for FF only - I don't know if there currently is a good solution for doing that with ZSA - have you tried dragging the link or dragging the URL from the URL bar to Zotero?
  • duvane5678
    Had the same question and found this thread. Using FF 12 and ZSA 3.0.6 in Windows Vista I had no luck dragging URLs or tabs.

    However, I did find that you can abuse the "attach stored copy of a file" under "add attachment" by pasting the desired URL in place of the filename. The caveat is that the resulting filename will be exactly what is after the last slash in the URL, even if that's not an actual filename. In a couple of cases where the resulting filename contained periods and did not end in pdf, I had to attempt to rename it, have it "lose" the file, then locate it (right where it should be), and finish renaming it. If the URL ends in a Windows-friendly filename, everything seems to work great. I'm guessing this is Windows related functionality, so may well not work in other OSes.

    I suppose if there was a function that allowed one to rename files at the time they are added to zotero, that this might work out of the box, but as it is, its not too bad.
  • dipahart
    zotfile I think is the FF plug in that lets you do just like you say:
    I suppose if there was a function that allowed one to rename files at the time they are added to zotero, that this might work out of the box, but as it is, its not too bad.

    It's great.
  • nirmalv
    Once you use duvane's method of downloading the material, just right click on the PDF and click retrieve metadata.
  • zurpher
    I started using Zotero Standalone and I really miss the option to save PDF files directly to Zotero as it is possible with the Zotero Firefox version. However, the Zotfile workaround functions reasonably well.
  • dstillman
    edited September 10, 2015
    When viewing the PDF, you can drag the icon to the left of the URL directly to Zotero. (You might be able to drag the link to the PDF as well, though that's not working for me at the moment.)
  • zurpher
    Wow, I'm very impressed.

    I've noticed that when I drag the link to the PDF into Zotero, it gets renamed automatically while when I drag the icon into Zotero, the original PDF name is retained. How come?

    I guess there must be more drag and drop features waiting to be discovered. Something similar for tags would be nice.
  • adamsmith
    You can drag multiple items onto a tag (in the tag selector on the left) to mass-tag, if you're referring to that?
  • zurpher
    @adamsmith No, but that's a nice feature too. What I have in mind is to select a word or phrase in Firefox by double clicking it and then pulling it in Zotero to a specific entry so that it automatically becomes a tag. This would be helpful because not all translators import keywords automatically yet.
  • zurpher
    edited September 21, 2015
    @ Dan Stillman & adamsmith

    Importing PDFs worked nicely with Zotero Standalone 4.0.20 but not in 4.0.28 for me. However, I have to admit that I work with a rather awkward website that displays PDFs embedded within it (still it worked previously though).

    See for an example:

    http://digitool.hbz-nrw.de:1801/view/action/singleViewer.do?dvs=1442833116054~51&locale=de&preferred_extension=pdf&preferred_usage_type=VIEW_MAIN&DELIVERY_RULE_ID=10100&frameId=1&usePid1=true&usePid2=true

    By the way, I have no problems with the drag and drop with, for example:

    http://d-nb.info/958133948/04
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