quickly create a open-pdf link

FriSti
Is there a way to quickly create a “zotero-openpdf on page x” link?

With zotfile this is possible, but to create the link is tideous.
Zutilo gives the feature to copy the link to "select" a given Item.
But I couldn't find any add-on which will create a "open-pdf" link option.
This would make life much easier to easily reference certain pdf-pages in other applications.
Any recommendations?

(With some knowledge about coding this seems easily to achieve, but I lack this ability completely ;)

  • ZhiliangWu
    Try this:
    zotero://open-pdf/0_[item links_from_zotlio]/[page_number]

    Note:
    1. The term [item links_from_zotlio] is from clicking "copy selected item links" on the pdf file you are interested rather than its parent item.
    2. 0_ seems to be a necessary term.

    Similar ideas have been discussed https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/73776/create-external-link-to-open-pdf-within-zotero.
  • dstillman
    While that works, this is the newer supported format:

    - zotero://open-pdf/library/items/[itemKey]?page=[page]
    - zotero://open-pdf/groups/[groupID]/items/[itemKey]?page=[page]
  • dstillman
    (Also note the new PDF reader available in beta.)
  • ZhiliangWu
    @dstillman Thanks for the correction. The new format looks more elegant!
  • michaelkhuber
    For me, it is only possible to use the open-pdf links directly on itemKeys of PDF attachments. Is there no way to invoke open-pdf on the itemKey of the parent element containing the pdf attachment? When I try to do so, nothing happens.
  • 7f8jsjsi38
    That (being able to link to the parent element, which is usually the citation you're after) would be a great feature -- maybe. I'm not sure.

    It'd be nice to have some variation of Quick Copy where both the parent itemKey and the child (local PDF) itemKey are exportable via a simple translator. I looked at the CSV translator and it has an example of cycling through the parent item's attachments to get the filesystem path of a child PDF. This could be parsed to extract the PDF's itemKey, but it seems kludgy unless you had very solid understanding of the Zotero API.

    Can't imagine there's a perfect solution, since a parent item can have multiple PDF child items, so that'd be messy.
  • mjvolk3
    I cannot get zotero://open-pdf/groups/[groupID]/items/[itemKey]?page=[page] to work. Has anyone else had this issue? The best I can do is zotero://select/groups/[groupID]/items/[itemKey] which simply opens the library which the item belongs to. I would like the uri to at least open the pdf of the group shared item. Thanks!
  • robinzhu
    For anyone arriving here from Google:

    The fastest way to get an open-pdf link in Zotero 6 is to drag an annotation from Zotero's built-in PDF reader and drop it on any text field you're working on.

    I don't know how it's possible this eluded me for an entire year and more, and it's somewhat disheartening to discover, that after so much time spent researching this and making workarounds work, the solution would be so simple that nobody ever talked about it.

    Just literally drag the annotation to your text field and you're done.
  • robcollett
    @robinzhu - What classes as a text field? If I drag an annotation to a Word doc I just get the annotation text with no link.
  • robinzhu
    Thank you @robcollett for testing it out in Word. I used this functionality mainly in Obsidian, Craft, as well as TextEdit on macOS. (No third-party plug-ins required for Obsidian.) It also seems to work in any other plain text field. But since I almost never use Word while reading PDF, it didn't come to me that this might fail there; also, Word's text processing area is *not* the same as other plain text fields, so it seems reasonable that this would fail there.

    I would suggest opening a good old TXT file alongside your working Word document, and drop your annotations there to obtain the link. Then you can copy that link and paste it into Word.

    Hope this helps!
  • robcollett
    Thank you @robinzhu for the tip! You wouldn't by any chance no how to write a link that takes you to a specific page of a PDF on the Zotero.org online reader?
  • robinzhu
    @robcollett That's certainly an interesting extension to this topic, but I'm afraid I know no better about Zotero's online reader either. Perhaps you could find some clues by looking at the page URL when you are at a specific page in the online reader?
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