Firefox "Save To Zotero" on PDF download does not work if standalone is open

moorepants · December 11, 2014

I often have Zotero standalone open (I prefer it to the in-browser version) and download a PDF in Firefox. The download dialog has a really nice "Save To Zotero" option, except it is not available if the stand alone version is open. It would be nice if you could use this while zotero stand alone is open.

adamsmith · December 11, 2014

sorry, I don't think that's going to be available with Zotero in connector mode (i.e. with Standalone open).

moorepants · December 11, 2014

I am able to have standalone open and click the little icon in the url bar and the document succesfully saves, but that isn't always available on a pure pdf.

Is it a technical reason it can't be implemented or something else?

dstillman · December 11, 2014

Simon and Aurimas would know better, but I imagine this is possible with Zotero for Firefox in connector mode. I don't think it's possible in Chrome and Safari, though, since we can't extend the save dialogs, and there may not be much motivation to implement this just for Firefox connector users.

aurimas · December 11, 2014

I haven't really looked, but in Chrome you don't have a pre-download popup dialog, just the download bar at the bottom. Under some circumstances Chrome does ask you whether you want to keep the download, so I guess we could extend that interaction, but otherwise it would mean a good amount of work for, what I think, is minimal reward.

Simon started some time ago implementing a way to add a URL bar icon for PDF pages that would actually be a URL bar icon for the previously-viewed page. It could improve user experience under some circumstances (i.e. user views the publisher's abstract page and then clicks on the PDF link), but it can also end up importing incorrect metadata (e.g. a user clicks on a PDF link from the bibligraphy), which I think is worse than not offering the functionality.

We could simply add a URL bar icon for PDF pages that would download the PDF directly to Zotero. In the future that could also start automatic metadata extraction. Though, for PDFs that are served with "Content-Disposition: attachment" header that would not help. In Chrome we might be able to extend the download popup that has "Show in Folder", "Open", etc. functions and add something like "Move to Zotero".

I think adding the URL bar icon is a worthwhile investment, but, given that ZotFile offers "watch folder" functionality (and perhaps Zotero should do that natively in the future), it's probably not worth messing with download dialogs.

Edit: went a bit on a tangent. For Firefox in connector mode, we should make that work, along with debug logging.

moorepants · December 11, 2014

Ok thanks for all the clarification. The dialog extension for downloads is a really nice feature in Firefox. It gives you a two click approach to get a downloaded file into zotero instead of just to the file system which saves a lot of time. But since it doesn't work with zotero standalone open, it takes about the same amount of time to close zotero and then go back and try the download again as it would be to download to the file system, switch to zotero and then import the downloaded file. Thanks for the consideration of this. It is now noted for future reference :)