Zotero Connector not saving pdfs

alexbaines
Ok my use case is not the same as most as I only deal with papers occasionally. I look to reference government standards, schemes and have to give updates on latest news/releases etc. So I need to reference everything that I do. However, at work I cannot install zotero app so I can only use the connector. I collect with that and then sort and organise files at home on my mac. However, I cannot save pdfs in chrome.

One recent example is www.gov.uk/government/publications/autmn-statement-2022-documents. I can snapshot this page absolutely fine. Yet when I follow the link to one of the pdfs, the connector icon changes to a pdf yet I get an error message stating that "this item could not be saved because Zotero is not open or is unreachable. Please open Zotero again." Although I have just taken a snapshot of the previous page on the same server absolutely fine.

Anyone any ideas that I can use to get it working? Or cannot I not effectively upload a pdf from a site that I want to categorise properly etc later at home?
  • adamsmith
    The link above seems truncated -- can you post it again?

    What you're trying should absolutely work in general, yes
  • dstillman
    edited November 23, 2022
    We actually don't currently support saving standalone PDFs directly to the online library. I can't remember if this was a technical limitation at the time or just a choice we made because the online library doesn't support PDF metadata retrieval, so you'd end up with just a standalone attachment. If the latter, we do allow direct PDF saving on iOS, where we also don't yet have metadata retrieval, but there there's no other option, whereas many people saving direct to the server with the Connector likely just have the app closed and could open it. But @alexbaines and others in a similar situation would presumably prefer to be able to save the standalone PDF and run metadata retrieval when back at home…
  • alexbaines
    @adamsmith Sorry actually a typo somehow https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/autumn-statement-2022-documents

    @dstillman thank you for clarifying that. Yes there is little metadata available with a lot of these documents so I am happy to run it when back at home. If the page I was on saved the pdf to that page then that would be fine but that doesn't happen either and I suspect that is to do with the setup on the websites themselves?
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