Preview pdf below

jhelie · October 23, 2024

I've just installed Zotero and it looks great so far. My only gripe is that I can't seem to reproduce the layout I had when I was using Papers over a decade ago and where the pdf content of the currently highlighted paper could be displayed below the list of papers.

I found this very useful to view papers while browsing through a collection, without having to "properly" open them and jump into a new tab. I know the pdf preview is available in the side pane but that's too small and, for me, the wrong place as that pane is mostly about metadata, not content.

I had a look at the Layout settings but couldn't find anything, is this currently not possible?

martynas_b · October 24, 2024

Isn't View → Layout → Stacked View sufficient?

jhelie · October 25, 2024

Thanks for the quick reply. Stacked view is sort of going in the right direction but the pdf is still "buried" in a non very accessible way - and I can't make it full width, nor continuous scroll. I think this is due to the panel being a metadata panel, not a content panel - it just happens to contain a preview of a pdf.

Conceptually I see the entries in my library as being pdfs with metadata and a useful layout for me would be made of 3 windows:
- the list of entries on one line with basic (customisable) info (title, year, authors, journal...) (top half window)
- the content of the currently highlighted entry (bottom half window)
- the metadata associated to the currently highlighted entry (side vertical panel)

These list + content windows seems like a standard layout, adopted e.g. by all mail programs (outlook, Mail, Thunderbird.. ) and the one I remember from when I was using other reference managers such as Papers. But if I'm the only one suffering from this issue maybe the tool is simply not a good fit for me.