Extract pdf easily

Dannoral · March 25, 2018

Hello, and sorry if what I'm about to ask has already been resolved or announced somewhere.
I just realized that you can no longer extract pdf by dragging the reference out of Zotero (unless you select the pdf alone, which implies doing it one by one if you want several of them at once). We could do it before...

Anybody know if we can fix this?

dstillman · March 25, 2018

Dragging parent items has never copied files to the filesystem, if that's what you mean. The only change here is that Zotero now automatically retrieves metadata for PDFs, so if you had PDFs without parent items (which isn't really how Zotero is meant to be used) you could just select those before.

If you want to select multiple PDFs, you can perform a search that matches only the PDFs — either using the search bar or with a saved search (e.g., set to Attachment File Type is PDF) — and then use Select All to select all the search matches.

Dannoral · March 25, 2018

I always dragged parent items to extract a copy of the pdf before (to send for example)...
This is not a false memory, I did that many times in recent years for my thesis and in the supervision of my students.
Anyway, if we can do more... it'll take longer.

dstillman · March 25, 2018

If you don't believe me, you can reinstall Zotero 4.0 with a separate profile and try for yourself. It won't work. Here's the code from 4.0 that limits this to attachment items:

https://github.com/zotero/zotero/blob/273194eaf3d39c3cd28b1d30a72493021b2bc0fa/chrome/content/zotero/xpcom/itemTreeView.js#L2608

https://github.com/zotero/zotero/blob/273194eaf3d39c3cd28b1d30a72493021b2bc0fa/chrome/content/zotero/xpcom/itemTreeView.js#L2626

And it's the same in Zotero 5.0:

https://github.com/zotero/zotero/blob/2effad4f6a9db1f86758ba77eaef1fa04be3e904/chrome/content/zotero/xpcom/itemTreeView.js#L2683

Dragging parent items doesn't totally work, because items can have more than one file attachment. But we could consider 1) only dragging the "best" child attachment file (the same one that we open on double-click) or 2) dragging all child attachment files, renaming any that are in conflict.