THREAD SOLVED
Summary:
The problem was that when I used org-ref (or helm-bibtex) “open pdf” from the menu function, a buffer to dired “/” would open rather than the pdf.
This was actually two problems that I confused for one. The first issue was that the menu that I was using was the org-ref menu’s (C-c C-o on cite:) “2. Open PDF” option. As @nobiot discovered what is actually happening is that org-ref-open-pdf-at-point calls org-open-file which opens the file in the default pdf view. @nobiot so helpfully provided a solution.
The second issue is that relative links for the file field weren’t being parsed correctly by helm-bibtex. This was solved by changing the file field to jabref links: this is done via Zotero. Also don’t forget to set bibtex-completion-library-path to the parent folder of the exported bibtex files.
Huge thanks to @nobiot and @mshevchuk for all their help. Absolute legends.
Now that you have solved the original problem, I don’t need to dig much further (congratulations; it’s your solution )…
My BBT setting on Windows looks different. I don’t turn on the JabRef metadata, I get the absolute path for the file, and I have no problem with openning PDF (and also :NOTER_DOCUMENT: property to open Org-noter from the note (for your other issue in another post)).
My solution technically fixes the issue I had however, yeah, it seems like the jabref messes up the org-noter functionality. I’m on linux so I think that’s why I’m getting the relative paths rather than absolute.
I’ll keep looking into. Slowly getting a phenomenal setup going.
@nobiot, I wanted to thank you for making this suggestion above, which I just happened upon in the last month. Even though I’ve been using Emacs off and on for 30 years (!), I had never heard of the edebug functionality, but now it’s one of my favorite things about Emacs, along with advice, which I found out about last month by posting a question to Stack Overflow.
Now, whenever there’s something in Emacs I want to change, I edebug a function in the vicinity of what I want, look at all the values of all the sexprs as they are evaluated, and then figure out how to use advice to change things to work the way I want them to. Emacs is a hacker’s paradise
Yes, I think edebug helped me learn Emacs and Elisp very quickly over the last year. When I started using Org-roam about a year ago, I hardly wrote Elisp; now I feel much more comfortable.
… Now it is blessing and curse; you will be sinking more disposable time into Emacs
)…
