zotLook 1.4.0

The contact sheet gets the two buttons the EPUB preview has: the document's
contents in one corner, its annotations in the other, and every entry a jump
to its page — the tile framed and brought to the middle of the window. A click
on the tile still hands over to the reader. The page overview of an EPUB has
the same two buttons.

Contents come out of the PDF's outline, read by the renderer and resolved
to pages, named destinations included. A PDF without an outline gets no button.

Annotations come from Zotero's database, in reading order: the quotation
marked as it is marked on the page, the comment, and "Page 12" — the printed
label where the PDF names its pages. Notes, areas and ink are listed by their
kind.

Two settings, both on by default, switch the buttons off. They count
towards a kept sheet, as does the state of the annotations on its own account,
so a new highlight reaches the list even where nothing is drawn in.

None of it uses a script — a preview panel runs none — which is why it works in
Quick Look, GNOME Sushi and QuickLook alike. The documentation shows it in
motion, and its PDF now carries version and date in the footer.

Requires Zotero 10 — the version zotLook is developed and tested against.
macOS 12+, or Linux with GNOME Sushi, or Windows with QuickLook running.

zotLook 1.3.4

Internal hardening. Nothing changes for a reader; this is the release the
plugin's own checks now stand behind.

The modules are closed. Each of the plugin's four modules is sealed or
frozen, and three fields that used to appear on first use are declared. That
is what lets the type checker — which now runs in npm test — see a misspelt
method name anywhere in the plugin, the mistake it could not see before.

A preference call loses two arguments it had carried since the XPCOM
days, ignored since Zotero 7. Comments that described two functions as
returning the opposite of what they return are corrected.

Requires Zotero 10 — the version zotLook is developed and tested against.
macOS 12+, or Linux with GNOME Sushi, or Windows with QuickLook running.

zotLook 1.3.3

Windows preview follow-ups.

• The QuickLook and GNOME Sushi previews now close when you click a page of the contact sheet, opening the reader behind them — as the windowed sheet already did.
• EPUB page links address the exact position the reader keeps for each page. Where a page's mark falls mid-column, Zotero's paginated reader names the containing page (its own page navigation does the same); scrolled flow lands on it exactly.

The macOS build carries the signed qlpreview helper. Windows and Linux need no bundled binary.

zotLook 1.3.2

Linux, mostly — and one change to the windowed contact sheet.

Escape closes a Sushi preview from Zotero. The moment a preview opens,
GNOME hands it the keyboard, and Sushi answers only its own keys: Space,
Escape and q close it, the arrows are its accelerators, and a chord it does
not know falls on the floor. No plugin can hear a key the compositor gave to
someone else, so zotLook answers well where it does hear: Escape back in
Zotero now sends Sushi's own Close over the bus, and the documentation says
plainly which keys never arrive.

Arrows walk the item list from inside the preview, the way GNOME's Files
walks a folder. Sushi puts every arrow press on the bus, and zotLook listens:
the selection moves at once and the preview follows once the keys come to
rest, so a held arrow is one preview rather than a storm of them — and no
download per row on a download-as-needed library. It is a setting, since
whether arrows should do this at all is taste.

The windowed contact sheet closes when it hands over. Clicking a page
opened the reader behind the window, which stayed in front of it. Standing
beside the reader had been the window's advertised reason to exist, and the
opposite turned out to be the right behaviour — the system preview already
closed as it handed over. Now the window does too, on every route.

Its own window answers the preview's keys. A bare Space or q closes the
windowed sheet, as either closes Sushi and QuickLook — kept out of modifier
chords and typing fields.

Requires Zotero 10 — the version zotLook is developed and tested against.
macOS 12+, or Linux with GNOME Sushi, or Windows with QuickLook running.

zotLook 1.3.1

Windows preview fixes, and the shortcuts now close what they open.

Kept previews survive a restart on Windows. They had been written inside
Zotero's own temp directory, which Zotero empties on every shutdown — so the
contact sheet and the EPUB preview were rebuilt from scratch each time, and
the settings pane always reported 0 B.

A kept entry whose EPUB assets were read-only can be removed. On Windows
such an entry lingered for good; the write bit is put back before the entry
is deleted.

Escape and the shortcut close the preview. Pressing the shortcut again,
or Escape, now dismisses the QuickLook preview and the windowed contact
sheet, from every route that can open one — and a preview opened from the
context menu no longer takes the keyboard away from Zotero. The windowed
sheet closes through its own command rather than through the reference the
plugin holds, so it also survives the stray unload the window fires while
loading.

Nothing else changes. There are no new features and no settings to revisit.

Requires Zotero 10 — the version zotLook is developed and tested against.
macOS 12+, or Linux with GNOME Sushi, or Windows with QuickLook running.

zotLook 1.3.0

A page overview for books

Ctrl+Shift+Space on an EPUB now gives a contact sheet, which sounds
impossible: a reflowable book has no pages. It has none of its own. But a book
published beside a print edition usually carries that edition's pagination
along with it — marked in the text, listed in the navigation — so that a
citation to page 212 still means something. Where those marks are there,
zotLook cuts the book at them and shows a page at a time.

• Each tile is that page's own text in the book's own typography, shrunk rather
  than re-typeset, so the line breaks and the proportions are the book's.
• Clicking a page opens the book at it in Zotero's reader, as the PDF sheet's
  thumbnails do.
• Annotations are drawn in, as on the PDF sheet and in the EPUB preview.
• A book carrying no printed page numbers says so, rather than showing
  arbitrary slices. Most trade fiction carries none; Springer, O'Reilly and
  most textbooks do.

The sheet goes through the same store as the EPUB preview, so it survives
restarts and is cleared and aged out with everything else. Nothing else about
the plugin changes.

Requires Zotero 7 or later. macOS 12+, or Linux with GNOME Sushi, or
Windows with QuickLook running.

zotLook 1.2.3

The windowed contact sheet moves to Ctrl+Alt+Space

Ctrl+Shift+Space shows the contact sheet in the system's preview panel; Ctrl+Alt+Space now shows it in a Zotero window. The same work in a different frame, one modifier apart — where the previous default, Ctrl+Shift+Tab, said nothing about what it does.

Checked on all three systems rather than assumed. Microsoft's own list of Windows shortcuts claims Alt+Space (window menu), Ctrl+Space (Chinese IME) and Win+Space with Win+Shift+Space (input languages) — and not Ctrl+Alt+Space. That list is also why the Windows key is no candidate: Win+Space is spoken for, and Win combinations rarely reach an application at all. GNOME takes Alt+Space and usually Super+Space, not this one. Zotero binds no key to the space bar and keeps its own configurable shortcuts on single letters.

::: One caveat, stated rather than left to be discovered
macOS lists Ctrl+Option+Space as previous input source — switched off where a machine has one input source, and on where it has several. On such a Mac the default is swallowed and nothing happens; Settings → zotLook → Shortcuts is where that gets put right.
:::

Your own choice is unaffected: this is the default, and Restore defaults is what writes it.

Install

Download zotlook-1.2.3.xpi below, then in Zotero: Tools → Add-ons → gear icon → Install Add-on From File… Installed copies update themselves.

zotLook 1.2.2

The windowed contact sheet moves to Ctrl+Shift+Tab

Shift+Alt+Space was awkward to reach. Bare Shift+Tab could not have it: Zotero moves focus backwards with that key across twenty-two targets — collections pane, item list, item pane, toolbars, tab bar — and since zotLook consumes a matched keystroke, taking it would have stopped anyone tabbing out of the item list.

With Control held, Zotero's focus handler returns at once: it drops any Tab carrying a modifier other than Shift. Its own tab switching sits on Ctrl+PageUp and Ctrl+PageDown, on macOS also on Cmd+Shift+[ / ]; its tab bar is not a XUL tabbox, so the toolkit does not claim Ctrl+Tab the way a browser does; and macOS lists no system shortcut on the Tab key at all.

Your own choice is unaffected — this is the default, and Restore defaults is what writes it.

The conflict check sees more

It was built from the main window's <key> elements, which is everything the DOM can be asked for. Zotero binds a good deal in its own keydown listeners instead, so the pane reported no conflict for Shift+Tab — worse than reporting nothing, because it sounds like an answer.

Those keys are in the registry now and named, so a warning says what holds the combination.

Install

Download zotlook-1.2.2.xpi below, then in Zotero: Tools → Add-ons → gear icon → Install Add-on From File… Installed copies update themselves.

zotLook 1.2.1

Kept previews survive a restart

They never did. The store sat inside Zotero's own temp directory, and Zotero registers a shutdown blocker that removes that directory whole at every exit — so a contact sheet or an EPUB preview was gone by the next start, on every platform, and the settings pane truthfully reported 0 B beside Delete kept previews.

They live in the profile's cache directory now — AppData\Local on Windows, ~/Library/Caches on macOS, ~/.cache on Linux. Per-profile, cleared by nobody else, and still not backed up with your library. The settings pane names the folder, so you can delete it by hand with Zotero closed.

Reported from Windows, fixed there, and confirmed on Linux and macOS: a kept entry now outlives repeated restarts, while entries left by an earlier build or an earlier layout are still cleared at startup.

Wording

The German settings said behaltene Vorschauen, which reads like something left lying about; it now says zwischengespeicherte.

The EPUB help claimed a preview extension "will usually render the book better". That was fair when the conversion was a few chapters concatenated — it is not a claim to keep making now that the page carries the book's own typography, its table of contents and its annotations, and it is not zotLook's place to rank someone else's extension either way. The setting is offered as a choice instead.

Install

Download zotlook-1.2.1.xpi below, then in Zotero: Tools → Add-ons → gear icon → Install Add-on From File… Installed copies update themselves.

zotLook 1.2.0

EPUB previews grow up

An EPUB preview now shows your annotations, in their own colours and with the distinction between a highlight and an underline kept — the same way Zotero draws them, because the styling is taken from its reader rather than guessed at.

Zotero stores the position of an EPUB annotation as an EPUB CFI: spine item, element path, text node, character offsets. That identifier is now read and resolved against the chapter it addresses, so a passage is marked where it was actually marked — not where a search for its wording happened to land. Palettes beyond Zotero's own eight work too, zotQDA's among them.

The book is also read out of its archive now, through Gecko's own zip reader and the EPUB module Zotero uses for its full-text indexing. Gone with them: an external unzip (and bsdtar on Windows), a subprocess with a timeout, and a directory of loose files to clean up afterwards.

Contents and annotations as menus

Both sit behind a button in the corner of the preview and open over the text instead of pushing the book down. Each annotation entry shows two lines and unfolds on demand; clicking one takes you to the passage.

All of it is <details> and CSS — a preview panel runs no scripts, so a menu that needed one would never open.

Previews that outlive the session

The contact sheet, the EPUB preview and the annotated copy of a PDF now go through one store instead of three arrangements, two of which forgot everything on restart. An EPUB converted once is there in the next session.

Two settings are renamed to say what they govern — Keep converted previews and Drop previews unused for — and your old values are carried over. Annotations get a switch per format: drawing them into a PDF costs a copy of the document, marking an EPUB costs nothing worth naming, so the two are worth deciding separately.

Also

• Shortcut recording says so when a combination never reaches Zotero, instead of waiting silently for a key the system has already taken.
• A collision with another shortcut is shown under the row it concerns, and stays shown.
• Nine screenshots of the plugin at work on macOS, Linux and Windows, in the README and the documentation.
• The English documentation is declared as en-GB.

Install

Download zotlook-1.2.0.xpi below, then in Zotero: Tools → Add-ons → gear icon → Install Add-on From File… Installed copies update themselves.