what happened when pdf is opened but all I can see is blank?

nikhoahk · February 25, 2023

just like the title said, I load a pdf to zotero, open it, sometimes nothing shows(whole pdf is white paper, sorry i dont know how to add pictures in the discussion), sometimes several pages(like 1-4p) show fine

dstillman · February 25, 2023

You can take a screenshot, upload it somewhere (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.), and provide a link here.

If this happens only with specific PDFs, you can link to them here or send them to support@zotero.org with a link to this thread.

nikhoahk · February 26, 2023

Picture:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Zi4HMuq4cX9pDDGY52PcipUsfd24P5NA/view?usp=share_link

nikhoahk · February 26, 2023

i dont konw if pdf(500mb) is too big for zotero to run?

nikhoahk · February 26, 2023

PDF(500MB):https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mpxDW9LtfH2PqbG_Up_aF_OSBDuWWsFX/view?usp=share_link

dstillman · February 26, 2023

Yes, I'm afraid it's pretty much just too big, with huge scanned images — it loads, but very slowly. You can see more or less the same thing in Firefox — long delays before pages show up. Zotero 6's PDF reader is based on an older version of Firefox's PDF library, so it will be even slower than current Firefox. Zotero 7's PDF reader will be much faster, but it can only be about as fast as current versions of Firefox are.

You can likely speed it up by reprocessing the PDF (e.g., in Acrobat) to reduce the size of the scanned images.

nikhoahk · February 26, 2023

thanks for your help

swq2018 · February 27, 2023

When opening some scanned PDFs that are more than 100MB, Zotero's built-in PDF browser will remain blank. But those PDFs can opened by Adobe. And when opening many PDFs in Zotero, even if it is not browsed at the same time, it will be very stuttering. Hopefully, the authors can improve the performance of Zotero