Add PDF to Zotero (in collection) without drag/drop

bjohas
Is there a way to add PDFs to Zotero, at the top level of a collection, without drag/drop?

The functionality I'm looking for is "attach stored copy of file", but without an item selected. Or like "Import" but being able to import PDFs. Or similar to ZotFile that alerts you to new PDFs in download folder.

The idea is that once the PDF is imported, metadata detection takes place.

Basically, sometimes the Zotero connector doesn't detect a PDF as PDF. (Presumably because the site wraps it in some html.) But I can still download. So I'd like to download, but then go straight to my Zotero collection and say "import PDF".
  • dstillman
    New Item (plus sign) menu → "Store Copy of File…"

    The Zotero Connector should detect PDFs as PDFs even if they're in iframes, though, so if you're not seeing that somewhere, provide an example URL and we can take a look. If you view PDFs in your browser, you shouldn't ever really need to download them and add from the filesystem.
  • bjohas
    Doh :) Many thanks!

    The issue with the connector detecting the PDF seems to be to do with timing. For example, this PDF is shown witht the webpage icon, but if I reload the page, it shows with the PDF icon:
    https://www.poverty-action.org/sites/default/files/publications/Improving-Learning-Outcomes-December-2019.pdf

    As a hypothesis: Is it possible that for large PDFs the connector somehow times out? I'll post as I come across other examples.
  • dstillman
    What browser? Are you on a particularly slow connection?

    That's not really a big file, and it worked fine for me on the first load.
  • bjohas
    (Incidentally, when I save a PDF via the connector, should the URL also appear in the item? For me, that isn't the case.)
  • bjohas
    edited March 1, 2020
    No, not slow really (10+Mb/s up/down). The file took maybe a few seconds to load. (It was just a thought..., clearly not the case!)

    I'm on Ubuntu 19.04, on Chrome, Version 80.0.3987.122 (Official Build) (64-bit).
  • dstillman
    edited March 1, 2020
    when I save a PDF via the connector, should the URL also appear in the item?
    Not for that PDF. The URL you got it from is added to the attachment itself. It wouldn't really be appropriate to add it to the parent item's URL field, since it's just an arbitrary URL on the internet that Zotero doesn't know anything about and not necessarily representative of the publication itself. For academic PDFs that Zotero is able to recognize, there'll often be a DOI or URL from the official metadata, but that doesn't apply to random documents that just happen to be in PDF format.
  • bjohas
    Having said that, I just closed some tabs and reloaded the file. It took about 5 secs to load, and I had the same problem. Once the file had loaded and I did a reload, the file loaded much faster (from cache I guess) , but even before the reload had completed, the icon changed to PDF.
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