A plugin for Zotero 10 — the version it is developed and tested against — that previews attachments when you press Space, the way a file manager does. It carries no viewer of its own, but drives the preview panel the system already has:
- Quick Look on macOS,
- GNOME Sushi on Linux and
- QuickLook on Windows.
📖 Documentation — zotlook.org · Deutsche Fassung
The same three keystrokes on all three systems, each driving the preview that system already has. Click any image for the full-size version.
| macOS · Quick Look | Linux · GNOME Sushi | Windows · QuickLook | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Space preview the attachment |
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| Ctrl+Shift+Space contact sheet |
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| Ctrl+Alt+Space the same sheet in a Zotero window |
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The contact sheet's two menus, on macOS: the contents from the PDF's outline, the annotations from Zotero, each entry bringing its page to the middle of the sheet, and a click on the page handing over to the reader.
Shift+Space previews the item's notes.
- Anything the system's preview panel can show, plus EPUB, which zotLook renders itself because no system preview does.
- Your annotations are in the preview — in a PDF and in an EPUB alike. Zotero keeps them in its database rather than in the file, so a preview of the stored document would otherwise be unmarked. An EPUB is marked where you marked it: zotLook resolves the EPUB CFI Zotero stored, and draws highlights and underlines the way Zotero's own reader draws them.
- An EPUB carries its contents and its annotations behind a button in each corner, opening over the page. Clicking an annotation takes you to the passage. No script is involved, which is what lets it work in a preview panel that runs none.
- Clicking a page of the contact sheet opens it in Zotero's reader at that page. A button in each corner opens the document's contents and its annotations, each entry a jump to its page.
- A book gets a page overview too, where it can have one. A reflowable EPUB has no pages of its own, but one published beside a print edition usually carries that edition's pagination along with it — and zotLook cuts the book at those marks, one tile per printed page, each linking back into the reader. A book carrying none says so rather than showing arbitrary slices.
- Previews are kept and shown again, across restarts, until the file, its annotations or the settings behind them change. What they occupy is shown in the settings, where they can also be cleared.
- Synced files that are not downloaded locally are fetched first.
- Shortcuts, which attachment wins, the grid and the page limit are all configurable under Settings → zotLook. English and German.
- Zotero 10 — the version zotLook is developed and tested against
- macOS 12 or later — nothing else to install
- or Linux with GNOME Sushi (
apt install gnome-sushi) - or Windows with QuickLook running
zotLook still installs on Zotero 7 and later, and may well work there, but it has been neither developed nor tested on 7, 8 or 9, so nothing about them is claimed. Reading Zotero's own sources says this much:
- Everything else the plugin calls is there in 7.0.0 already —
zotero://open-pdf?cfi=,PreferencePanes.register,PDFWorker.export,getMainWindows. EPUB.mjs, which the EPUB preview and the EPUB page overview are built on, first appears in Zotero 8. Below that, everything to do with EPUB cannot work.- Whether Zotero 7 keeps its bundled pdf.js where the contact sheet looks for it, I could not check.
If you run zotLook on an older Zotero — successfully or not — please say so. Reports are welcome and will be reflected here.
Download the latest .xpi from
Releases, then in Zotero:
Tools → Add-ons → gear icon → Install Add-on From File…
Zotero checks this repository for new versions and updates the plugin itself from then on.
./build.sh # a release build needs macOS with the Xcode CLT
npm install && npm testThe build script also runs on Linux, where there is no Swift toolchain for the
Quick Look helper; it then packages everything else and leaves update.json
alone.
How all of it works — driving each system's preview, the EPUB conversion, the contact sheet renderer, the test suite and the release process — is in the developer guide.
When something goes wrong says what to check first and where zotLook writes down why a preview failed — a file worth attaching to a report. Bugs and requests: issues.
zotLook is a fork of gchapron/Zotero7QuickLook by Guillaume Chapron, from whom the code and the MIT licence come. Roughly half of his JavaScript survives verbatim, and the architecture is his throughout.
Further back stands mronkko/ZoteroQuickLook by Mikko Rönkkö, which brought Quick Look to Zotero 4–6 and gave this line of plugins its purpose and its name. The debt to it is one of idea, not of code — of 206 substantive lines in the original, exactly one also appears here, and it is a Zotero API call any such plugin must write.
The full accounting, with the measurements behind those numbers, is under Origins.
The plugin ID is zotlook@fre.ms, distinct from Chapron's, so the two install
side by side rather than over one another.
MIT — see LICENSE.