Make the external PDF viewer configurable instead of relying on OS default

tdsmith
I'd like to be able to open my science PDFs in Utopia but I'd like to use Preview as my OS default.
  • slowkow
    I am also very interested in this feature.

    I use Foxit to read and highlight research papers because of the annotation features. For all other PDFs, I use Okular because of the faster startup time.
  • wouterhendrickx
    Same here, as long as zotero is not building its own, it would be extremely usefull for those use using utopia or readcube for scientific literature but not all pdf's
  • slowkow
    edited January 12, 2014
    Here's a simple solution that has been working for me for a while.

    I want to open pdf files with program A unless I'm double-clicking an item in the Zotero application, in which case I want to open it with some other program B.

    I changed my OS settings so the default program for opening pdf files is the shell script shown below. I keep my Zotero files in the folder "zotero-data" and use playonlinux to launch Foxit Reader for my Zotero pdf files because Foxit has nice highlighting and annotation features. 

    #!/bin/bash

    if [[ "$1" == */zotero-data/storage/* ]]
    then
        f="z:${1//\//\\}"
        /usr/share/playonlinux/playonlinux --run "Foxit Reader" "$f"
    else
        evince "$1"
    fi
  • wouterhendrickx
    I would also like to see a simple zotero setting to choose the reader to use when opening a pdf from within zotero.
  • AlexMak
    I also really want this feature to be able to use ReadCube for some papers.
  • gustafbstrom
    Bump! This feature would be really useful to be configurable for me as a user. I'm using Mac and for all scientific papers, there is this program "Skim" that is excellent for annotation and so on. Otherwise, I'm using the builtin "Preview" program for its simplicity.

    So: _please_ add this feature; as a suggestion to the Preferences menu!
  • dstillman
    In Zotero 5.0.36, available now, it's possible to choose a custom PDF viewer from the Zotero preferences.
  • gustafbstrom
    @dstillman That is excellent news, thank you very much!

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