How to directly open PDF on cloud from zotero?

risaueno92
I have all my papers in OneDrive, and I want Zotero to open the PDF of a paper stored on OneDrive when I click on a paper title. At the moment, when I click on a title and do "show file", it shows me a local directory /Users/me/Zotero/storage//paper.pdf and opens it from there on my mac. Is it possible to get Zotero to instead open the file from the OneDrive directory i.e. /Users/me/OneDrive/Papers/? I would like to do this because I store all my pdfs on cloud and I make highlights using an external PDF viewer. I would like my highlights I made on my OneDrive pdfs to be reflected every time I re-open the PDF from Zotero.

I installed Zotfile and set Location of Files to /Users/me/OneDrive/Papers/ (I have a bunch of subdirectories here), and I used the same directory in Zotero > Preferences > Advanced > Files and Folders > Base Directory. I restated the program but every time I click on a paper on Zotero it pulls the file from the Data Directory location.
  • dstillman
    Setting up ZotFile doesn't change your existing stored-file attachments. ZotFile can convert stored-file attachments to linked-file attachments, but you wouldn't want to do that if you already have the files — you'd need to actually add those as linked files and then delete the stored versions.
    I make highlights using an external PDF viewer
    To be clear, that's just how Zotero works, and it works equally well for stored files. So that part isn't relevant. In general, we recommend using stored files and letting Zotero manage the files, which just works.
  • risaueno92
    @dstillman Thanks for your quick reply. I deleted the stored local files and added the items into my collections with "Link to File" which seemed to work (had to manually add the items separately for each collection though).

    Is it possible to set up the following?

    If I use Zotero on a different computer, I would like it to access the PDF synced on cloud e.g. I set up linked files on laptop1 as /Users/laptop1/OneDrive/Papers/collection1/, /Users/laptop1/OneDrive/Papers/collection2/ etc. (different subfolders for each collection), Zotero on laptop2 to open the pdf on /Users/laptop2/OneDrive/Papers/collection1/, etc.
  • dstillman
    edited September 29, 2020
    Yes, setting a Linked Attachment Base Directory will cause linked files within that directory to be stored with relative paths so they can work on multiple computers with different base paths.

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