Feature requests
Ideas for what zotLook should do, and changes to what it does: where to put them, and what helps.
Have an idea for what zotLook should be able to do, or a change to suggest to a feature or a setting it already has? Please open an issue on GitHub, as you would for a bug:
https://github.com/fre-ms/zotLook/issues/new?template=feature_request.yml
I cannot promise it will be built, but I am glad of every idea: zotLook is a plugin from the community for the community.
What helps
- What you want to achieve, rather than the way to get there. The best way is often not the first one that comes to mind, and it is easier to find from the goal.
- Which system you are on. Much of what zotLook does is done differently on macOS, Linux and Windows, and a wish that is easy on one can be impossible on another.
- Whether something already does it — Zotero’s own preview, or an extension of the system’s preview. zotLook builds on both deliberately, and a wish that one of them fulfils may be a matter of pointing at it.
What zotLook is, and is not
A few things follow from how zotLook is built, and a request that runs with them has a better chance than one that runs against them.
- It drives the preview the system already has and builds no viewer of its own. What the preview shows and how it behaves is the system’s; what zotLook can change is what it hands over, and how.
- A preview runs no scripts. The contents and annotation menus, the page overview’s links: all of it is markup and stylesheet, because a preview panel would ignore anything else. A wish that needs a script in the preview needs a different route.
- One attachment at a time. Selecting an item previews one of its attachments, chosen by a ranking you set; resolving them all would download every synced attachment of every selected item.
- Annotations are read, not written. zotLook shows the annotations Zotero keeps; editing them is the reader’s job.
None of this is a closed door. It is where the plugin stands, so that a wish can be placed in relation to it.