When something goes wrong
Most of what zotLook does happens in someone else’s program — the system’s preview panel — so when nothing appears, the reason is usually one of a few ordinary things. This page is the order worth checking them in, and where to find the one file that says what actually happened.
Nothing happens on Space
Is the preview program there? On Linux the plugin drives GNOME Sushi (apt install gnome-sushi); on Windows, QuickLook, which has to be running. macOS needs nothing installed. The Platforms page says what each one can show.
Is the shortcut still yours? A combination the system or another application has claimed never reaches Zotero at all. The recording in Settings → zotLook says so when it happens: press the button, press your combination, and if nothing arrived it tells you rather than waiting silently.
Is another plugin on the same key? zotLook installs beside Guillaume Chapron’s Zotero7QuickLook rather than over it — different plugin IDs — so with both installed, Space is claimed twice. Pick one.
The contact sheet fails or comes out empty
zotLook writes down why. Zotero’s debug output is shared with every plugin and a chatty one drowns everything else out, so the last thing the plugin logged before a failure goes into a file of its own:
cat "$(getconf DARWIN_USER_TEMP_DIR)org.zotero.zotero/zotLook/last-failure.log"cat /tmp/zotero/zotLook/last-failure.logtype "$env:TEMP\zotero\zotLook\last-failure.log"It holds the plugin’s own last two hundred log lines and nothing else — no document contents, no library data. It is worth attaching to a bug report verbatim.
The exact temp directory is Zotero’s own, so if the paths above do not exist, Help → Debug Output Logging → View Output names it at the top.
A kept preview looks out of date
It should not: an entry is remade as soon as the file, its annotations or the settings behind it change. If one is stale anyway, Settings → zotLook → Delete kept previews clears them all, and the next call makes them afresh. The figure beside the button says what they occupy; after the deletion it reads zero.
The folder is zotLook-cache in the Zotero profile inside the system’s cache directory, and you may delete it by hand with Zotero closed — see Settings.
The page overview of a book says it has no printed page numbers
That is the honest answer rather than a failure. An EPUB reflows and has no pages of its own; the numbers a page overview shows belong to a printed edition and are only there when the publisher carried them into the file — marked in the text as epub:type="pagebreak", or listed in the navigation. Roughly one book in eight carries them, and those are mostly the academic ones: Springer, O’Reilly, textbooks.
Where they are missing, nothing can supply them, and a sheet cut at arbitrary points would be worse than none. Use the ordinary preview (Space) to read the book.
An EPUB annotation is listed but not marked in the text
The annotation list behind the button in the corner shows every annotation; one that could not be placed in the page is shown as such rather than left out. That happens when the position Zotero stored no longer resolves — most often because the book itself has changed since the annotation was made, so the chapter or the element it names is no longer where it was.
Reporting it
Please open an issue: https://github.com/fre-ms/zotLook/issues/new?template=bug_report.yml
What helps most:
- your operating system and version, and your Zotero version;
- what you pressed and what you expected;
last-failure.logif the contact sheet or an EPUB was involved;- for an EPUB, whether the book is one you can share — the awkward ones are usually awkward in a way no description conveys.
zotLook is tested on macOS, Windows and Linux, but on a narrow set of versions. Other combinations will turn up things. I cannot promise to fix everything, but a report with the file above in it is usually enough to see what happened.
An idea for what zotLook should do is welcome too — see Feature requests.