Word plug-in colors citations blue

rrryannn

Hello.

I am using Zotero 6 on MacOS with Microsoft Word. When I insert or update a citation, it becomes dark blue; sometimes text also receives a dashed underline. There are a whole lot of VBA commands present in the "Undo" menu afterwards, some of which relate to the text styling. Here is a screenshot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PYPrCN2qY9_NhqTn1nPW-BNwYMUI_Io0/view?usp=sharing

Is there a way to have the citations just assume the styling of the paragraph they are in?

Thank you.

dstillman

The dashed underlines are just having "Automatically update citations" off. That's perfectly normal.

I don't know what the blue is, though — I'm not sure we've seen that before. @adomasven might have an idea.

Does this happen in a new, empty document? Does it happen if you delete your Normal.dotm file and restart Word?

rrryannn

Thanks for your help. I just tried with a new, empty document (without deleting Normal.dotm or restarting), and the citation was inserted with the same color as surrounding text (black). Then I closed Word, deleted Normal.dotm, and opened Word again, and the blue styling still appears when I insert a citation in the (non-new) document I am working with.

In case it is relevant: I don't use Word's templates but often (as in this case) create a new document by deleting everything from an old document (because I like the styles I have set-up, but I tend to change or add to them, so I don't want to commit to using a template (if I understand templates correctly)).

The text color I use is slightly "off-black" (#090613 / rgb(9,6,19)) towards blue, if that is anything possibly related, though the citations that are inserted in blue are more clearly a dark blue / navy blue.

dstillman

I think you'll need to debug this to figure out what in your existing document is causing this. I don't think we've ever heard of anything like this.

rrryannn

Okay. I will update here if I ever figure it out.

rrryannn

It seems this issue may be related to the "default" font settings found in (in Word):

Format > Font > Default... [lower left]

I have never used those settings before. When I selected a citation and when to this dialog, there I found settings like the dashed underline and "dark blue" color set. I tried to change these settings for the whole document, but still new citations were added in dark blue.

However, it must have been something in the document itself. So that I didn't have to rebuild all of my styles, I used the commands from

Tools > Templates and Add-ins

to copy my styles (thanks https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254547843) into a fresh, new document, and now Zotero citations inherit surrounding styling properly, including the color.

rrryannn

Okay, that did not solve it. But I have determined that it is citations that contain something like non-ASCII or non-English characters (e.g., æ, ø, å, þ, á) in author names that are inserted in the named color value "Dark blue". Also, citations without an author that use an article title in the citation and therefore true/curly apostrophes (“”) also are inserted in blue. The citations are not assuming an underline in this fresh document, and they do inherit the proper font and font-size.

It is only the citation/field that is blue, and surrounding text fully maintains the assigned style. I am also finding that subsequent citations, if they do not contain problematic characters, insert with the proper color of the style and not blue. (There is no color-related VBA command appearing in the Undo menu in this case.) However, I mention this because, based on this issue in past documents, there seems to be a point at which any new citation will be inserted and changed to blue whether is contains a problematic character or not.