What it does
Shortcuts
Every action has exactly one shortcut, and every one of them is configurable.
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
| Space | Preview the selected item’s attachment. Again, or Escape, to dismiss. |
| Shift+Space | Preview the item’s notes, rendered as a page. |
| Ctrl+Shift+Space | Contact sheet: every page of a PDF as a thumbnail, or a book’s printed pages. |
| Ctrl+Alt+Space | The same sheet in a Zotero window: it scrolls under the keyboard and needs no system preview. Again to close it — or Escape, Space or q, the keys that close the system preview. A click on a page hands over to the reader and closes it. |
Each shortcut is its own switch: the press that put a preview up takes it down again, and Escape does the same. A different shortcut while one is showing switches to what it shows — a contact sheet gives way to the plain preview of the same file on Space, and back on the sheet’s shortcut.
On Linux that holds while Zotero has the keyboard. GNOME focuses the preview as it opens — the same happens when Files opens one — and from then on the window answers its own keys: Space, Escape or q close it, and the arrow keys walk your item list with the preview following, exactly as they walk the file list in Files. Back in Zotero, the shortcuts speak again.
The same actions sit in the right-click menu. The contact sheet entries appear only when the selection actually contains a PDF or an EPUB.
The defaults are the same on every system; only the way they are written differs, since ⌃⇧ are macOS keycaps and mean nothing elsewhere. They avoid the combinations the systems take for themselves — Spotlight, input-source switching, and the window menu a window manager claims before the application is ever asked. There is more on that in Architecture.
Space is ignored while the item list is collecting a find-as-you-type search, so typing a title with spaces in it still searches.
What it previews
Anything the system’s preview panel can show: PDFs, images, video, HTML, plain text, office documents, and whatever a third-party preview extension adds. The plugin hands the file over untouched.
EPUB is the exception. No system preview renders one, so zotLook converts the book on the fly into a single styled page: the spine walked in reading order, each chapter’s body appended, the book’s own stylesheets pulled in so its layout and typography survive, and a Palatino base font in a book-width column laid over the top. Images, fonts and inline SVGs resolve, because relative URLs in both markup and CSS are rewritten. A converted book is cached until the file changes.
Your annotations are in it. Zotero stores the position of an EPUB annotation as an EPUB CFI — spine item, element path, character offsets — and zotLook resolves that identifier against the chapter it names, so a passage is marked where you marked it. Highlights carry their colour at half opacity and underlines are drawn as underlines, the way Zotero’s own reader draws them, and palettes beyond Zotero’s eight work as well as its own.
A button in each corner opens the contents and the annotations over the page. The contents come from the navigation the book carries, so the titles and their nesting are the publisher’s rather than guesses drawn from headings; the annotations are listed in reading order, each quotation cut to two lines until you unfold it, and clicking one takes you to the passage. Both are <details> and CSS — a preview panel runs no scripts, so a menu needing one would never open. A book with no navigation gets no contents button.
Because the plugin cannot reliably tell whether you have an EPUB preview extension installed, the conversion is a setting rather than a guess: turn it off and the book goes to the panel like any other file.
The contact sheet
Every page of a PDF as a thumbnail in a scrollable grid — useful for finding the figure you remember, or for seeing at a glance which pages you marked up.
- Annotations are drawn in, so the marked-up pages stand out.
- A button in each corner opens the document’s own contents and its annotations over the grid, as the EPUB preview has them: the contents from the PDF’s outline, the annotations in reading order with the quotation, the comment and the page. Clicking an entry brings that page to the middle of the window, framed. A PDF without an outline gets no contents button, and both buttons can be switched off.
- Clicking a page opens it in Zotero’s reader at that page. This works from the preview panel on macOS and Windows, and from the window variant everywhere — Sushi’s view cannot follow a
zotero:link, which is what the window variant is for on Linux. - The layout adapts. A document with few pages gets fewer columns and correspondingly sharper thumbnails, so it fills the width instead of leaving space. The column count is configurable.
- No page limit by default. A 300-page book takes a few seconds. A limit can be set for unusually large scans; when it bites, the sheet says how many pages it is showing.
The window variant (Ctrl+Alt+Space) puts the same sheet in a Zotero window, where it scrolls under the keyboard and needs no system preview. A click hands over the same way everywhere: the reader opens at that page, and sheet and panel alike close behind the handoff.
A page overview of a book
The same shortcut on an EPUB gives a sheet too — which sounds impossible, because 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 and 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. It is not a facsimile — the printed layout is in the PDF and nowhere in the EPUB — but it is enough to see where a table sits or a chapter begins.
- Clicking a page opens the book at it, in Zotero’s reader, exactly as the PDF sheet’s thumbnails do — at the very position the reader keeps for that page. In paginated flow the reader shows whole columns and names the page at a column’s top, so a page whose mark falls partway down a column is shown within the column above it; scrolled flow lands on it exactly. Zotero’s own page navigation behaves the same way.
- Annotations are drawn in, as they are on the PDF sheet and in the EPUB preview.
- The same two buttons as on the PDF sheet: the book’s navigation and its annotations, each entry a jump to the page’s tile.
- A book without printed page numbers says so. Most trade fiction carries none, and nothing can invent one; a sheet of arbitrary slices would be worse than none. Academic publishers — Springer, O’Reilly, most textbooks — usually do carry them.
Which attachment gets previewed
Selecting a parent item previews one of its attachments. By default the order is PDF, EPUB, HTML, image, video, anything else — and it is a ranking, not a filter: a type near the bottom is still used when nothing above it is present. You can reorder it, or switch to simply taking the first attachment the item lists.
Only the chosen attachment is ever resolved. Resolving them all would download every synced attachment of every selected item only to throw all but one away.
Localisation
Menu entries, settings and progress messages are available in English and German, following Zotero’s own language setting.