Change language in Zotero - Ubuntu Gutsy

olsandvi

I have tried Zotero on a Windows with Word 2003 computer and changing language in Zotero is very easy with Quick locale switcher add on in Firefox.

However, when I want to do the same on a computer with Ubuntu and OpenOffice, Zotero refuses to change locale.

Any ideas?

olsandvi

I finally found away to easily work around this problem; however, I really hope the developers find a way to solve this in Zotero.

The solution is to select the correct language you want to use before you log in to Ubuntu. This can be done very easily by clicking on 'Options' in the lower left corner of the log-in screen.

This changes the language for the whole session, but that shouldn't be a problem for anyone writing papers in more than one language :-)

huu

Well, logging out and then back in again is not what I'd call an _easy_ workaround. I, too, routinely write papers in more than one language, and for me this issue is almost a show-stopper. Not quite, but almost: it really is pretty annoying to have to change things like 'et al.' by hand once the article is finished.

The real problem here is using the locale mechanism for determining the language of the citations. In effect, this assumes that people always write in the language their user interface uses -- but this assumption is not always correct. An ideal solution would be to add a language setting that can be changed in the word processor plugin on a per-document basis, but a setting that can be easily changed in Zotero itself would help.

Would someone in the development team have an idea of how difficult it would be to implement something like this?

dstillman

Would someone in the development team have an idea of how difficult it would be to implement something like this?

It's already implemented in 1.0.1. Go to about:config in the address bar and set extensions.zotero.export.bibliographyLocale to one of the four-letter-plus-hyphen codes that make up these filenames, e.g. "en-US", "de-DE", "fr-FR", etc. The last two letters need to be capitalized. Then restart Firefox.

We'll expose this in the UI in a future release.

bpjonsson

If you enstall the MR Tech Toolkit extension you will get a menu item to open about:config in the FF Tools menu, along with some other goodies.

<https://addons.mozilla.org/sv-SE/firefox/addon/421>;

BTW I noticed that when I switch locale in about:config I have to restart FF for it to take effect.

BTW is there a British English locale now?

hcsiller

just to clarify, huu's suggestion of a per-document setting has NOT been implemented.
Currently, you can set the language for ALL your documents in Firefox via about:config, but you cannot work on documents in different languages at the same time, because it is a global setting.

See my feature request here:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/16112/perdocument-locale-setting-choosing-language/