[HN Gopher] Zotero 6 ___________________________________________________________________ Zotero 6 Author : Schiphol Score : 472 points Date : 2022-03-17 18:05 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.zotero.org) (TXT) w3m dump (www.zotero.org) | WHA8m wrote: | I'm with Zotero for about 2 weeks and I'm very much in love with | it. I use it mainly to store and categorize downloaded Websites | (SingelFile) and PDFs. | | While a PDF viewer (and every functionality that comes with it) | is greatly appreciated, I'd wish for same for html and other | formats. That'd be overkill :) | | One thing that I really miss and actual slows my process, is a | proper tag-system. Something like Anki has: being able to make | tag hierarchies by higher-tag::lower-tag. I'm a heavy tag-user | and the overall experience with tags in Zotero is very average. | But maybe I'm using this application for stuff that's not | intended for. | | Overall great project and surely something I'll donate a few | bucks to the next time I'm on that spree. You guys doing gods | work. Love it! | kkfx wrote: | I suggest to store them on de-duplicated filesystem or manually | run fdupes and co to hardlink any duplicate in your Zotero lib | because most modern websites are full of big js and zotero copy | them countless of time, if you have a non marginal set of | mirrored pages you probably waste more than 60% of occupied | storage just in duplicates... | unixhero wrote: | Anybody use this for business or consulting? I finished my thesis | a long time ago. | ska wrote: | I've used it for a bunch of things in multiple companies, and | as a consultant. | | On the other hand, my post-academic career has been still | pretty reasearch-y at times, so I read papers. | | But I've used it to organize/track datasheets, whitepapers, | resumes, consulting inputs, etc. | titlefixer wrote: | aDfbrtVt wrote: | The notes functionality along with the new iOS beta is amazing. | Makes marking up papers on an iPad very convenient. I would | encourage every who uses Zotero to sign up for a paid storage | plan to help support development. | synergy20 wrote: | tried to do pdf annotation on linux, failed to figure out how PDF | can be attached/added/opened with zotero. | jimmygrapes wrote: | I cannot tell from the changelog for this or the previous version | whether Zotero has expanded its metadata and formatting | capabilities to better support legal citations, so I guess I will | stick to the Jurism[0] fork for now. If anybody knows of a better | way to make this work in Zotero directly, I'm all ears. | | [0]: https://juris-m.github.io/ | zwayhowder wrote: | I have an extensive academic citation collection in multiple | languages, Juris M is way better for my needs. | | I love the fact that open source software allows this but | sometimes I really wish they'd just incorporate the two. | Quanttek wrote: | It'd be so fantastic if the Zotero team could consider | integrating their changes. I know that many probably won't | necessarily need its advanced futures, but I see no risk of | confusion as it's easy to use and mostly hidden in the "case" | category. | tedyoung wrote: | OMG, I've been waiting for an iOS app for Zotero for so long. | Yay! | jrochkind1 wrote: | As someone who writes web apps used by academics... I find it | really hard to find documentationon on how to make my web | site/app work well with zotero! They seem so used to more-or-less | adversarial web development, that when we're like "We want to | make this work as well as possible with zotero, like I'm going to | spend development time doing that, can you give me some clear | docs on my options?" -- I have trouble finding it. Like how can I | make sure zotero can properly find an attached PDF, or citation | info (including for list pages with multiple things cited) or | whatever. Without requiring a custom zotero connector for my | (tiny) site, how do I make my site just work? Many of my users | definitely use zotero. | dstillman wrote: | https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/exposing_metadata | | (Disclosure: Zotero dev) | worg wrote: | Does anyone have some good learning resources for Zotero? | jszymborski wrote: | Truly amazing! I wonder if the iOS app in development will have | all these note-taking features and work on iPad. If so, Zotero | completely blows all of the competition out of the water at a | price you can't really beat. | epiecs wrote: | It does. It even has webdav sync for the past few months. Just | subscribe to their testflight app and you can test the beta | right now :) | Freak_NL wrote: | Not just for scholarly reference management: Zotero is a great | tool to keep track of the books you have if your personal library | exceeds one or two Billies in volume. For books printed after | 1970 the ISBN alone is enough to have it fetch the most relevant | metadata for any book published anywhere from online catalogues. | I find Zotero particularly useful when going to a book-fair; it | is easy to export a list of titles and authors of books you own | so you can easily reference it to see which books from a | particular author or series you already have. | exhilaration wrote: | _one or two Billies in volume_ | | Possibly the most universal of all units of measurements. For | the uninitiated: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/billy-bookcase- | white-00263850/ | cholmon wrote: | I've never heard "billy" used like this before now, thanks | for the clarification. | exhilaration wrote: | It transcends nation, culture, and language. _In the | future, we will measure the distance between the stars in | billies._ | account-5 wrote: | I love zotero. Amazing software, indispensable. Want an easy way | to integrate with pandoc and Zim-Wiki, I'm sure there's a way but | I've not found it yet. | | Either way this software is massively underrated. | | EDIT | | What's with the official iOS app and no Android? | criddell wrote: | > no Android? | | iOS is probably their most important platform. If there are | enough users, I'd guess Android and Mobian apps will be | forthcoming. | heurisko wrote: | I used Zotero for its bibtex output. It worked really well. | prepend wrote: | I love zotero, and this isn't the web product, but I really wish | I could share a link to a bibliography to someone. I have to | export and send the text. I'd like to be able to share my Foo | citation library with a colleague without making my whole account | public. | | Would also be great for systematic reviews. | ska wrote: | Couldn't you do that with a group library? | oofbey wrote: | Anybody using this know if it works well for iPad + pencil for | scribbling notes on published research papers? | aDfbrtVt wrote: | The Apple Pencil support is still pretty rough, but it's been | getting better every update version. I've been using it for the | last couple of months. | mbreese wrote: | I haven't used their new iOS app, but it's a welcome addition. | In the past you had to sync your Zotero library with another | app for PDF annotation that was synced (papership). It was | never something I'd call robust or seamless and the papership | app has felt like abandonware. | | I'm looking forward to trying the new app today. | xattt wrote: | The iOS app doesn't come up as the first result in the App | Store. Not sure if it's because Zotero isn't popular enough | yet. | | Regardless, here is the direct link: | https://apps.apple.com/us/app/zotero/id1513554812 | bsmith89 wrote: | I just tested the PDF reader out for about 5 minutes and I can | already say it's substantially better for me on MacOS than any | other PDF reader besides Preview. No glitching like Acrobat and | the annotations features are more inline with what I want than | Preview's are. | | Very excited about this. | asleepawake wrote: | i agree it's great. some minor ux issues. for example if i | select text then click highlight it should highlight the | selected text. keyboard shortcuts for annotation would be | amazing. | MisterBiggs wrote: | After messing with the desktop version for a few minutes the note | editor is weird. It doesn't modify the original pdf or the copy | of the pdf it makes, the only way to get the highlights is to | export it as a pdf. I expected something similar to Okular where | edits would happen to the original file and update on ctrl-s. | | Other than that the editor is very well done! | [deleted] | pdevr wrote: | Looks good, from whatever I have seen and read. I am going to | give this a try. | | A question to those who have used Zotero: Can I opt to store | everything on the local device and have zero data transferred to | the server? Is there any kind of control over what is stored | locally and what is sent to the servers? | dragonstyle wrote: | My recollection is that it is all local by default. If you | don't specifically connect to their web service for syncing | data, none of the data is stored outside your local device. | hwbehrens wrote: | By default, you can use Zotero without logging in, which will | cause it to keep everything locally. It's not obvious how you | might go about partially syncing to the cloud, however. | | In practice, though you shouldn't store the SQLite in a cloud | sync service, setting up a symbolic link for the backing PDFs | in e.g. Dropbox works quite well and gives you more control | over your data syncing. Then, you only need to rely on their | cloud for the paper titles and metadata. | tomrod wrote: | Easily one of my favorite software solutions. | | I've tried EndNote. It's awful. Zotero is awesome! | behnamoh wrote: | Duplicate | liketochill wrote: | I'm still using qiqqa for my open source pdf search engine but | the qiqqa team has moved on. Qiqqa has been a secret weapon for | me in pulling up relevant paragraphs from research papers, | ebooks, and standards that I have previously saved but not fully | read. | jcuenod wrote: | I made my own (specifically for my Zotero pdf library): | https://github.com/search?q=user%3Ajcuenod+pdf | | https://jcuenod.github.io/bibletech/2021/07/26/full-text-sea... | Tenoke wrote: | I recently found my mendeley app doesn't work anymore (they've | discontinued it) so I decided to try Zotero. To my surprise they | have 3 Android apps.. none of which work and a bookmarklet which | also doesn't work. Has anyone found a way to easily save papers | on Android? | fcheslack wrote: | You can save urls or identifiers to your library from | https://www.zotero.org/save or using the magic wand icon in | your web library. | | We just stopped linking to the bookmarklet on the download | page. Unfortunately browsers no longer support them well if at | all. | | There is an open job post for an Android developer, but none of | the existing Android apps are first party. | | (Disclosure: Zotero dev) | jabl wrote: | Is it still based on the XUL platform? | [deleted] | hoistbypetard wrote: | The Linux tarball still looks like XULRunner to me. | bluenose69 wrote: | I've been using this in beta for quite a while. The PDF reader is | really very good, and I love the fact that my highlights and | notes are not added to the actual PDF file. (I don't want to mess | up the original PDF file, because I like to keep those files in | pristine form so that e.g. I can share them with students.) | | Some people here are asking about paying for storage for the | PDFs. My solution to this is to store my PDFs using Dropbox, and | to use _links_ in Zotero. That way, even if I give up on Zotero, | I still have the files. And I already pay for Dropbox, and just | don 't want one more bill to pay. | | And, woohoo, an iOS app! That's very sweet. | ska wrote: | If you sync your library to at least one device, you'll still | have all the files anyway if you stop paying - you just won't | be able to sync them anymore. The metadata will all still by | synced. | | The dropbox/onedrive/etc. approach works, but honestly I find | it easier to share files from a group library (they don't need | a paid account) and keeps structure etc. there also.... | lhoff wrote: | Zotero also offers out it the box WebDAV Support for file sync. | I use that to sync files using my Nextcloud. Once it is set up, | everything works behind the scenes. | | https://www.zotero.org/support/sync | jcuenod wrote: | My solution to your dropbox trick has been: | https://jcuenod.github.io/bibletech/2020/06/14/zotero-github... | SubiculumCode wrote: | Consider supporting Zotero through a subscription for their | online storage. | rockmemozart wrote: | The only thing holding me back from using Zotero is that, afaik, | you need to use a Zotero account to reliably sync metadata | between devices (the Zotero Data Server isn't supported). I wish | it was easier to self-host; there's no reason for me to interact | with their servers. | | It's always a disappointment to find otherwise great open source | projects that have key components that deny privacy. | jancsika wrote: | Can you export/import the data to/from devices? | lamontcg wrote: | I sync the data with syncthing, seems to work fine. | sva_ wrote: | Hint: You can sync the library for free by making an account. | You need the "Zotero Storage" only if you want to sync the | files as well. However, you can simply sync the folder | ~/Zotero/storage using SyncThing. You could also use WebDAV, | but SyncThing is just so much easier (set up & forget). The | IDs/Metadata is consistent among syncs. :) | | Of course, that doesn't resolve the privacy concerns, but | personally idc about that. | | edit: It seems like you might be able to sync everything by | just putting ~/Zotero/ into something like SyncThing, avoiding | the Zotero servers. But you'd probably have to be careful only | opening the app after syncing has been completed. I haven't | tested this though. | d110af5ccf wrote: | This is completely missing the point of GP. You can't (unless | something has changed) sync metadata without using their | servers. webdav is for the data, not the metadata. If you | don't personally care about privacy, fine, but that's | irrelevant here. | | Replicating the local Zotero folder across devices won't | properly sync the metadata in the face of concurrent changes. | | If I didn't care about privacy and freedom I would have just | used a proprietary product to begin with. It's an incredibly | disappointing situation to have dragged on like this for so | many years. | | Edit: Looks like nothing has changed. | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29774935 | epiecs wrote: | If you have a synology nas you can also easily install the | webdav server and use that :) | SubiculumCode wrote: | Yes, I wish they supported the server instance. Still, I don't | mind subscribing to their syncing because it is probably the | project's main source of revenue; although I am not for certain | about that. | _hzw wrote: | Zotero supports WebDAV and I was using it with box.com without | any troubles for years. What lured me to switch to Zotero's | sync and cloud storage in the end, though, is the group library | function. | thentherewere2 wrote: | As a current Mendeley user, any thoughts on what I should expect | if I want to start using Zotero? | hoistbypetard wrote: | Wow. I opened the Linux tarball and had a look around... what a | blast from the past. It looks like this is built on XULRunner and | friends. I had the impression that platform had slipped into such | disrepair that it was no longer practical to ship products based | on it. | | It looks tremendously useful, though. If it had been around when | I was in school, I suspect I'd have found it indispensable. | mijoharas wrote: | Is anyone else getting horrible stuttering when scrolling that | page? (I happen to be on mobile with a bad connection right now, | but it's so bad it makes the page almost unreadable) | WHA8m wrote: | I've been visiting said website on my iOS and hadn't had any | issues. Maybe re-check your side on some problem | hs86 wrote: | How good is Zotero as a bookmark manager similar to Pinboard.in | or Raindrop.io? Both have a paid feature that stores a permanent | copy of a site, but these are stored only on their servers, and | Pinboard's archive download feature never worked for me. | btrettel wrote: | I've used Zotero for over a decade to save webpages. It works | fine in my experience, though I'd prefer if Zotero saved all | the assets in a single file. | cxr wrote: | Zotero uses SingleFile. (Side note, this is, as far as I know, | a destructive process--you can't recover the original bits. It | would be interesting if Zotero switched to SingleFileZ and | there were a sidecar file embedded in the ZIP container that | would let you reverse the transformations to get the originals | back out--or just store them directly.) | | Zotero's snapshots work well enough on most pages you'd care to | throw at it in an academic context. Your mileage may vary if | you're using it as a general bookmarks manager, owing to the | amount of client-side scripting-driven chicanery on the Web | today. Notable example that I've found that Zotero didn't | handle well at one point: Medium (although the data was there-- | the saved copy just wouldn't render correctly in-browser when | opened; this doesn't appear to be an issue anymore for new | snapshots, at least for now). | | For most stuff that I want to have a durable URL for but that I | feel doesn't merit being in my Zotero library, I just use | ordinary browser bookmarks and make sure that the Wayback | Machine and/or archive.is has a copy. | | HN is also fond of Wallabag and ArchiveBox: | | - | https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... | | - | https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... | ulnarkressty wrote: | Anybody have any tips on self-hosted Zotero? Org doesn't like the | metadata syncing. Other option would be Mendeley Enterprise which | is supposedly more secure but not a great experience overall. | sva_ wrote: | Not self hosted, but see my comment | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30714926 | | Then you may use the Better BibTeX plugin to get your library | into Org. | mikepurvis wrote: | If I still was doing firmware dev, I could imagine this being | amazing for dealing with datasheets, especially when shuffling | between multiple parts all with their own descriptions of | intended functionality, errata, and so-on. | punnerud wrote: | Zotero is hiring (16 days ago here on HN): | https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dstillman | noodlesUK wrote: | Zotero is one of those pieces of open source software that has | really improved my life. I first discovered it as a teenager and | it revolutionised writing papers and managing sources. Sadly I | don't find myself using it that much in my job. | | I always got a kick out of introducing it to my friends in the | humanities and blowing their minds. I have no idea how anyone | writes papers without zotero or another similar tool. Keep up the | good work. | BolexNOLA wrote: | Honestly I haven't thought about it since undergrad (history | major), I didn't realize it was still kicking. I might have to | fire it back up! | asdff wrote: | You can even use it as a general knowledge repository since | you can save anything on zotero pretty much, not just journal | articles. | jrochkind1 wrote: | Mostly just PDFs? Or are there good ways to save non-PDF | content? | jarvist wrote: | The web plugin actually falls back to 'web page with | snapshot' if it can't detect a journal paper, which in | many ways is better than trying to drag around big PDF | binaries. | jrochkind1 wrote: | Thanks! I've used zotero only minimally, mostly to | support users of my software who use zotero, rather than | using it myself for my own purposes. | | Is the "web plugin" something built into zotero, or an | extra plugin to install? Calling it "plugin" makes it | sound like something extra to install, but not finding it | easily googling. Help me out? | lhoff wrote: | I think OP talks about the Zotero Connector Browser | Plugin. So its not a plugin for zotero but your browser | (Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Edge are supported) The | plugin ads a button to the Browser where you can add the | currently viewed page to your database. It even tries to | detect references to papers or other content and choose | the matching entry type. Eg on Google Scholar you can | choose which search result you want to add. It its a PDF | the file gets saved to your zotero database. | | All in all very handy. | jjoonathan wrote: | Agreed. | | What really blows my mind is how many of my academically | inclined friends manage (and cloud sync) a big library of | pirated papers using a rival piece of software owned by a major | rights holder of said pirated papers. I mean... there's a good | chance nothing will come of it, but it just seems like tempting | fate. Zotero isn't just good enough, it's so good that the | choice is completely trivial IMO! | | Thanks, Zotero :) | SubiculumCode wrote: | I've converted all my colleagues to Zotero, even though the | University has contracted subscriptions to EndNote et al. | Zotero is just better. I wish that the UC System would | contract with Zotero for their mutual benefit. | jessriedel wrote: | There's no sales team at Zotero to interface with the UC | behemoth... | sam537 wrote: | This just made my day. | jart wrote: | I love the name. As soon as I saw this link at the top of HN, the | Totoro theme started playing in my head. | https://youtu.be/p1KVuFStqEM | 999900000999 wrote: | Any OCR support? | | I literally pay 20$ a month to fill out PDFs | computer23 wrote: | Checkout the ocrmypdf project: | | https://ocrmypdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html | 999900000999 wrote: | Thank you for sharing this awesome project! | | I'm probably stuck using Adobe for now, just because for | anything really important you can't rely on anything aside | from the official Adobe PDF editor to not screw things up. | Up. But I absolutely love your project, I can imagine this | would work great for academics. | | You can automate much of your research between machine | learning and directly reading PDFs. Many older publications | don't have searchable text at all, and searchable text is a | lifesaver when you're doing research. | jcuenod wrote: | +1 | ska wrote: | Do you mean for searchability? There is an indexing tool built | in, IIRC built from xpdf tooling. | TheCabin wrote: | I used Zotero quite a bit in the past, the thing that ultimately | drove me away is that when synchronizing you couldn't easily | access the PDFs just via the filesystem. I use a nextcloud and | also wanted to access PDFs from devices without Zotero installed | and this turned out to be a pain at the time. Is this possible | with more recent Zotero versions? Is the sync still cumbersome | with a zotero account + self-hosted webdav? | _aavaa_ wrote: | I have a similar setup (Zotero + dropbox). Zotero syncs the | entries and any notes, but dropbox takes care of the pdf | storage. You can swap out dropbox for your storage of choice. | | I use zotfile (http://zotfile.com) to handle this. | | Files are all stored in a single folder (which can be in | different locations depending on computer) which I point | zotfile to. Inside that each paper is put into a folder based | on author names. And each pdf is then renamed based on authors, | year, and title. | | All of the above is customizable and automated. | kristjansson wrote: | I can't recommend ZotFile enough. It, along with Zotero, have | basically solved cross-platform cross-device reading and | reference management for me. | jcuenod wrote: | Another +1 for Zotfile, but Z6 looks like it bakes in some of | zotfile's features. | AlanYx wrote: | There is a plugin called Zotfile that makes this easier. | | But in some ways Zotero 6 makes filesystem workflows more | complicated, in that PDF annotations don't get stored as actual | annotations in the PDFs. | asdff wrote: | You don't have to use their system, you can just use your | standard pdf viewer too. | iamcreasy wrote: | You can still access the pdf file via the file system by right | clicking on the item and 'show file'. The files names may not | be user friendly though. | ska wrote: | There is handy functionality to rename pdf files based on | parent metadata. I think you can set this up to be done | automatically on import too. | | This is great to have consistent filenames from lots of | different sources. Of course if the metadata is wrong or | missing, it won't help. | dynamic_sausage wrote: | zotfile plugin, mentioned above in this thread, makes file | names user friendly. | bachmeier wrote: | This looks really nice. Zotero has never stuck with me for some | reason but I last used it a few years ago. I'll try again. | | One problem with this type of service is that there's usually a | huge jump from unpaid to paid, but the jump to the lowest paid | tier of Zotero lets you pay $20/year for 2 GB of storage. I can | handle that. I have more difficulty with the $15/month and | $90/year and such paid tiers. Even at $20/year, that comes to | $100 after five years for what is largely a donation to support | development. | ska wrote: | One probably non-obvious thing is that the $100/yr ish | unlimited storage tier includes everything you do as a user | _including shared libraries_. | | So if you have a group of people working together in a group | library, one shared library subscription covers all of them. It | doesn't take many people to make this worthwhile. | | And as you say, it's a good way to support a great project. I | do it even when I'm not really using the software. | bachmeier wrote: | > I do it even when I'm not really using the software. | | I'll drop a one-time donation of $10 or $18 or something | largely independent of my use - or even if I don't use it at | all. I don't treat it as a purchase, though I can understand | that others do. | folli wrote: | >...comes to $100 ... for what is largely a donation to support | development. | | That's not that bad for a useful product, is it? | bachmeier wrote: | No, but I'm saying it's enough. The $90/year service comes to | $450 over five years, and that's definitely too much. | greenicon wrote: | You can use just the metadata sync by them and sync the actual | files with e.g. webdav or syncthing or whatever. That way it's | free. | bachmeier wrote: | If I use it, I'll pay them. I can use the savings from all | the VC-subsidized software I don't have to pay for. | Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: | I've been using this for years. Zotero is great. It's not | perfect, like you still need add-ons to properly support bibtex | for latex users, like myself. It would be alot better if this was | a fully integrated part of the base zotero platform. But it works | and I like it. | layer8 wrote: | I see there's an iOS app in beta. Will that require using Zotero | Storage, or will there be integration with Files, or directly | with other storage providers (Dropbox etc.)? | ricksunny wrote: | I hoped they've fixed Google Docs stability (deactivating GDocs' | Work Offline is supposed to help with this, we'll see..) as well | as reducing the time for a bibliography update when the number of | citations is over 100 - it's currently taking 20+ seconds | (happening in the background as I write) | ricksunny wrote: | And even still encountering the dreaded "these citations have | become unlinked from Zotero" - this is the equivalent of the | blue-screen-of-death for OS's . . . maybe Zotero should focus | on improving this stability rather than new feature build-out | and I would be come a paying customer/member? | murphyslab wrote: | The annotation features will definitely help Zotero to keep | relevant, but Zotero still desperately needs a better option for | saving websites. The ability to save sites, via browser | extension, as a single file (MHTML or even HTML-only) has been an | open request since 2007. | | - https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/919/ (2007) | | - https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/33516/ (2013) | | - https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/68378/ (2017) | dstillman wrote: | Zotero has saved webpage snapshots as single HTML files since | November 2020. We're using SingleFile under the hood. | | (Disclosure: Zotero dev) | murphyslab wrote: | I'd been watching the changelogs for it intermittently and | never caught it. Guessing that this is you: | https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/85306/available-for- | bet... | | My apologies for the erroneous comment and massive THANKS! | for adding that feature. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-17 23:00 UTC)