Word with Zotero endnotes to Indesign

LeahAlbert · February 23, 2023

Hello, I'm a designer who regularly receives Word documents using Zotero for endnotes, references and bibliographies. Whilst Indesign can import any native Word endnotes as dynamic links, everything Zotero comes in static. We need hyperlinked/dynamic links for any digital output. This mean re-inserting every reference which seems like unnecessary double handling and gets very time consuming and problematic. Is there any way to convert the Zotero links to native Word once the editing is complete, or any solution for export that keeps the Zotero links intact for Indesign? If Word can export dynamic links I'm not sure why other software can't. Many thanks for any help.

adamsmith · February 23, 2023

If someone is actually using/creating endnotes with Zotero, they're just regular Word endnotes and would be linked exactly the same way.

What I assume you're seeing as static are numeric bibliographies (e.g., in Vancouver/NLM sytle), which look similar but are conceptually quite distinct: whereas endnotes, like footnotes, are always sequential, the same item cited multiple times in a numeric bibliography is always cited with the same number. Citations and bibliographies are not hyperlinked in Zotero.

This wouldn't be impossible to do, and if you search the forums you can find some custom Word macro's that try to approximate this (you're not the only one looking) but given how Zotero's citations works it's very much not trivial and I don't believe it's going to happen any time soon.

LeahAlbert · February 23, 2023

Ok, that makes sense. Indesign doesn't deal with repeated references too well, I generally use the endnote function then add cross references where needed. Seems like it will be a manual process, too many different users at play to get into any complex processes or solutions. Thanks for your response.