Support of zip files on webdav drive | Voters

Support of zip files on webdav drive

complete

Marcin Śmigielski

Hi, if Zotero is using webdav, it is compressing files into zips, which contains PDF. Unfortunately in ZotAI we can't see them as PDF, so it's useless for people who are using webdav

February 26, 2025

Ahmed

marked this post as

complete

Will mark this for complete for now, although we decided to take a different approach which is accessing user's Zotero local folder instead of online Webdav (prioritizing confidentiality and asking for less credentials access!).

Ahmed

Hi Marcen
I hope you managed to fix this. Sorry just noticed your comment now.
PDF indexing is done by Zotero and it can sometimes ignore few files depending on their size etc. You can force index them from Zotero by either right clicking on non-indexed PDF file and selecting 'reindex item', or from Zotero settings window advanced tab and selecting reindex all library at once. 
I hope this helps.

Marcin Śmigielski

Well in ZotAI I was unable to index my sources. 
I was able to see them but there was no PDF accessible and it wouldn’t index, so I was unable to use AI prompts on it as well. I was assuming it is because Zotero keeps pdfs in zip when you’re using WebDAV thus I wrote this feedback.
On the config screen when it asked to choose a folder I was under impression I’ve needed to point a WebDAV directory, but I found out after tries and errors I should point to just some empty folder for ZotAI to store its config.
And investigating it further I’ve noticed that in fact ZotAI can read pdf attachments but not always. If I add item by mobile it wasn’t able to fetch data 100% of my tries, when I’m adding it through Mac app ZotAI can read attachments like in 60-70% of the time.
So I think that my original bug issue was wrong and it is not related to WebDAV but I don’t know why some items are indexing and others not

Ahmed

Thanks Marcin. Webdav support is coming soon but will be for different reason which is accessing images for AI prompts. Accessing PDF directly from ZotAI can be made available however would need extra time to be implement logic of displaying highlights and annotations as they're not hard coded on PDF files and rather kept on Zotero's DB if that makes sense. Is there a specific use case you're looking for?