ZotFile - Advanced PDF management for Zotero
This is an old discussion that has not been active in a long time. Before commenting here, you should strongly consider starting a new discussion instead. If you think the content of this discussion is still relevant, you can link to it from your new discussion.
This discussion has been closed.
(The citing function in Zotero is in citeproc.js, but that's not really relevant here).
I personally go a lot back and forth between papers: changing annotations, making additional comments after reading other papers, etc. so from my perspective having an updated version of my annotations would be awesome. The best-of-both-worlds approach you suggested sounds like a perfect solution to me. Together with being able to extract annotations based on color (see suggestion a couple of weeks ago) this would help me tremendously in my daily research.
I know you probably are very busy and there is not enough time to implement all this, so I would really like to help you. I don't have much coding experience but I will try my best. I just recently learned JavaScript with the hope of being able to contribute to zotfile and zotero.
Zotfile will typically not import files from the watchfolder or send them to the tablet if they are named with the extension ".PDF" in uppercase. When I change the filename extension to ".pdf" in lowercase everything works fine. This problem has been consistent over a large number of files from various sources.
I'm running Zotero 4.0.17 with Zotfile 3.1 on a Mac.
1. The ability to send everything within a collection and it's subcollections to a tablet by right-clicking on the collection name, rather than selecting the files within the collection and then moving on to select the files in the subcollections.
2. It would be wonderful to be able to specify separate naming and/or "send to tablet rules" for different collections. For example, in some of my collections I like to have Zotfile create a subfolder for each separate journal; for other collections, I'd like to just dump all the articles in a single folder on the tablet.
Overall, I think Zotfile in combination with Zotero is one of the best pieces of research software out there and can't thank the developer enough.
im using zotfile plugin in firefox and added a folder in a box file to sync with my android phone, after going online and given permission to sync the folders in the box.com website with my windows box app, syncronizing goes well when i send the file to the phone and back to computer for the first time , but if i want to send a new modification for a second round, the same pdf from my computer, then i get a double folder with the same name on the box app in the phone. this doesnt happens with dropbox, the problem is that box is an app more convinient since u send the app to the SD card, to avoid loading ur phones memory and get worried about getting slow performance on it.
Thanks ahead if any one knows how to fix this.
My system is windows 7 64 bit
I like your first feature request and have opened a ticket for it. Doesn't mean that I will add it soon but it's on the record and maybe some else helps out. Not sure about the other one. Seems overly complex. Someday, there might be an option to have different renaming settings for item types.
crschofo, I have never used box.com and I am not sure about the problems you describe. The zotfile feature should work with anything that uses a normal file system. Maybe someone else on the forum has experience with box.com?
I am using the latest Zotfile w Zotero 4.0 standalone and FF
under wins 8 x64, with foxit phantom pdf editor and adobe reader.
When I use zotfile to extract annotation from the pdf file, it creat a note with links like zotero://open-pdf/0_SI34ZECM/2
I clicked this link in attempted to open and navigate to the pdf where annotation was extracted from. However zotero did nothing but just open a blank zotero window. Both standalone and FF version have this problem. But I can open links like http:// or zotero://attachement.
I tried change the hidden option zotfile.pdfExtraction.openPdfWin to different reader .exe and change also default reader but without luck.
Any idea how to make that work?
Thank you.
Regards,
Hessen
Oh it now works great with v3.3 installed, though a blank zotero window still opens together. I was not aware that v3.1 is not supporting goto annoation for win. Thank you for the information !
Another question I have is, does zofile support watch folder with multiple level of subfolders? It would be great if it can auto import pdf from that folder and subfolders like what mendeley is doing, without prompting the user to triger a import. This is the last obstacle preventing me from switching from Mendeley to Zotero. Kindly let me know if you have some idea whether it is doable. Thank you again~!
https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/36084/automate-retrieve-metadatacreate-parent-item/
it may be doable, but as you can see it's rather complicated and won't happen soon. (It's also, in all likelihood, not a good way to use Zotero, or, more specifically, you're losing a lot of Zotero's key strengths if you're importing PDFs rather than going through the URL bar icon).
@aurimas and Joscha, I was running the latest beta of Zotfile and opening following the links to Nuance/Nitro by setting that program as the default pdf handler for the operating system. I am having a variety of computer issues at the moment, so I will let you know if the problem persists once I refresh my installation of Windows.
1. I have both Acrobat and Nitro Pro installed on my computer. Nitro is set as the default PDF program in the OS (setting it as default in Firefox as well doesn't change the behavior).
2. When I follow links in extracted annotations, the PDF opens to the annotation in Acrobat.
3. If I set the openPdfWin preference to the path to the NitroPDF.exe, the Nitro opens, but it starts a "create pdf" process and attempts to create a new pdf from the inputted link.
Any thoughts on what is causing the behavior in 2. or 3.?
1) I am not sure what's going on. Zotfile checks the registry for the path to the default pdf viewer. I don't have access to a windows machine so I can't really test anything. If you have coding experience, the javascript function to get the path to the default viewer starts on line 3109 in zotfile.js. You can play with it in the FF Scratchpad.
2) Does Nitro support the command line arguments to open pdfs on a certain page? The syntax is like this Acrobat.exe /A "page=2" path. Here are more details: http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/acrobat/PDFOpenParameters.pdf
I know that Adobe Reader, Foxit and PDF-XChange work but I never tested Nitro.
I have the same problem also with Zotero standalone. My Zotero Sqlite db is approximately 100mb, but the problem doesn't seem to be that since by only adding a record in the library (no PDF) the process only takes a fraction of a second.
I'm running ZotFile 3.3 with MLZ on my Mac. It was working great for a while, but today I can't use the contextual menus to manage attachments at all. They say "warning" in multiple places, and none of the commands work (for example, I've been trying to send some of my files to tablet). When I try to rename a file, I got the following error:
[Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [mozIStorageConnection.createStatement]" nsresult: "0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://zotero/content/xpcom/db.js :: Zotero.DBConnection.prototype.getStatement :: line 298" data: no] [QUERY: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM itemTags WHERE itemID=? AND type IS NOT 10000 AND tagID IN (?)] [ERROR: no such column: type]
Any ideas? Thanks!
cptnemo, it shouldn't take that long. What might hand zotero is the fact that each change from imported -> linked or the other way makes it necessary that I remove the attachment and re-add it, which triggers Zotero to index the pdf. Unfortunately, there is no way around that right now. You can try to temporarily turn of index and see whether it runs faster.
I will also post this error in a separate thread for MLZ.
Thanks for the suggestion on the registry key. That was the issue. Nitro appears to be a little sloppy in its implementation and doesn't update the registry. It also doesn't appear to support location handlers in its command line. Thanks for the information.