Paper Loom: stay with the paper
A Zotero companion from Kang Lab that brings listening, translation, reference previews and author networks into one reading workflow.
A difficult passage, an unfamiliar citation, a promising author: reading a paper often means moving between all three. Paper Loom, developed by Jun-Yan Kang, brings the listening and literature tools behind our earlier plugins into one Zotero companion, with shared settings and a connected reading workflow.
Listen closely. Keep the source in view.
Read a sentence, a selection, a paragraph or the full text. Listen once, repeat a passage, or adjust the speed from 0.5x to 2x. Source text, translation and playback controls stay close together, so you can compare wording without leaving the passage.
After installing the voice package, speech runs locally in English, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and French, with 14 voices including US and UK English. Translation uses your selected online service; you can read the result alongside the source or listen to it aloud.
Follow the reference, not a trail of tabs.
Hover over a recognized citation to inspect the paper and its abstract. Open a local attachment or DOI, copy a formatted citation, or save the paper to Read later. Original, translated and bilingual abstract views share the translation language used for passages.
Recognition depends on the PDF’s text structure. Scanned documents and complex layouts may require OCR or manual lookup; missing abstracts are not invented.
Find the people behind the papers.
Explore coauthors and their shared papers in your Zotero library. Focus on an author, see the work connecting them to collaborators, then consult a linked public ORCID record for available education, employment and research outputs.
One companion. One settings page.
Themes, transparency, interface language, shortcuts, translation fonts and citation styles now share a single settings page. Install the plugin as an XPI; download and check the appropriate voice environment from within Paper Loom when you want to listen. Reference, translation and author tools do not require the voice package.
The project declares compatibility with Zotero 10.x from 10.0.5-beta.1 and 11.x. Automatic voice packages are available for Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 14 or later and Windows x64; allow at least 3 GB for voice download, extraction and repair. Check the installation guide for current requirements and platform limitations.
Speech synthesis and PDF text processing run on your computer. Translation and online metadata queries contact the services you use; optional model providers may require your own key and incur charges. Paper Loom requires no account of its own and adds no telemetry or usage analytics. Its source is MIT licensed, with separate licences for third-party dependencies.