Are citations in Word image captions supported now?

adamsmith

In the debugging guidelines for (principally Word) documents with Zotero citations, we currently say

Check for citations in image captions. Zotero won't let you insert them, but if you copied a citation to a caption that's most likely the source of the problem. Delete it.

Is that actually still the case? I just tested creating an image with a caption in Word and then inserted a Zotero citation into the caption (which the above suggests shouldn't be possible) and switched citation styles around a bit with no issue, so I'm wondering if this is actually still a problem that we should warn against? (And if it is, it should actually be impossible to insert citations into captions, which it isn't)

adomasven

This needs to be cross-checked across versions of Word. Those guidelines do apply to LibreOffice and Google Docs too though. Google Docs doesn't really have captions, but it definitely causes issues in LibreOffice.

adamsmith

Yes, of course -- testing in LO 7.0 on Windows looks good:
Zotero inserts references into caption after displaying a warning that they're treated as if they're at the end of the document (captions are "text frames" in LO).
LO and Windows do behave differently with note styles: LO inserts the text of the note into the caption, Word the footnote, but I don't think that's a huge deal.

I'm not able to test on older Word version or Mac

bwiernik

Mac Word (current version) inserts note text into note, orders citations in captions based on their actual location.

adomasven

@adamsmith @bwiernik Looking through code, Word plugins will only insert citations into these sections of text: Body, Footnote, Endnote. LibreOffice also supports Text Frames and Table Cells.

Testing with Win and Mac Word, I see that if you insert an image and caption it, the caption is inserted in the body of the text. If however you select different wrapping of the image (such that it isn't in the flow of the text directly, inserting a caption inserts a floating text frame, where Zotero will prevent you from inserting citations.

So we could change that part of troubleshooting instructions to say that you shouldn't insert citations into floating text frames. That entry in the troubleshooting steps was added before I started working with Zotero, so I don't know what issues it's meant to prevent, but I'm sure someone spent time troubleshooting these issues on enough occassions to warrant an inclusion, so I don't think it should be removed completely.

enough7

It looks like in Word 16 citing in a caption of an image does actually work, but coping a citation to caption of an image does actually crash Word when one clicks refresh in Word-Plugin.