Location/URL bar icon for PDFs

[ahoward]

Add a location/URL bar icon for PDF files opened in Firefox, with auto-recognition of PDF metadata.

This would be easier than the current methods available: dragging the favicon into Zotero, or creating a new item from the page (which creates it as a Web Page with attached PDF, not optimal).

[dstillman]

I'm not sure we want to do this, but it's worth considering. As I mentioned to Andrew, ideally the icon would only appear when Zotero could auto-detect the PDF metadata, since that way the URL bar icon would retain its magic status rather than being a generic save icon (which we want to avoid). Auto-detection of a PDF is fairly equivalent to translator saving.

But we wouldn't want to send up a auto-recognize request every time someone viewed a PDF online. So one option would be to only display it when we had parsed some data from the PDF, but before actually sending a request--but then what would happen if it failed? Would it be equivalent to Create New Item from Current Page at that point (which, of course, is what we've wanted to avoid with regular web pages)?

For that matter, do we even auto-recognize any PDFs that would (legally) appear on websites for which we don't already have translators? (If a site has a good URL structure, an existing translator should be able to be extended to work when viewing a PDF, even if the user isn't on the article page itself.) If we don't, I'd say we don't want to do this, since we don't want the URL bar icon to be a generic save icon.

[ahoward]

I feel like this may be one instance where having the URL bar icon function as a generic save icon might be useful, if it's the only option available. Obviously, it would be preferable if it could auto-recognize metadata, but i don't think we should just avoid the whole issue if it can't. As Olivia Judson's article in the NYT makes clear, there's a sizable group of people out there who see tools like Zotero as a means of storing large numbers of PDFs. If we can make it easier to do that, I think we should, even if they're not utilizing Zotero to its fullest potential. Just a thought.