Word plugin and footnote text color

MG6

I recently began using Word with the blue background/white text option to avoid eye strain. This has caused me to notice that the Word plugin seems to insert text with the color set to black, rather than automatic. This makes it hard to read against the blue background. It's easy enough to correct by applying the correct style at the end, but I wonder if there are other, less trivial circumstances in which this might pose a problem. Is it something you might want to consider altering in the future? Would it be desirable to add default font and paragraph style settings to the Document Properties menu for notes and bibliography?
Thank you

Simon

Are you on a Mac? I just tested and this seems to work on Windows, but doesn't work on OS X because of a bug in Word. Zotero asks Word for the text color before inserting the note, and then restores it afterwards. If the text color is set to automatic, Word always reports that it is black. Additionally, Word reports that white text is yellow. It's very simple to verify this by opening AppleScript Editor and running the following script:

tell application "Microsoft Word" to color of font object of selection
This will tell you the font color as Word represents it to other applications, including Zotero. As far as I can tell, this isn't our bug, and I don't think we can do anything to fix it besides complain to Microsoft.

MG6

I have both, but yeah, I write on the MacBook. Thanks for the information!

Simon

Actually, I played around with this a little more and there may be a solution. Word also provides a color index property, which seems to work if the color is automatic. (Unfortunately, it has a very limited set of values, but since otherwise Word doesn't know that the color blue exists, it seems preferable to the alternatives.) I'll change this for the next Word plug-in release.

m.neiger

I use windows and Word 2003 and meet the same issue. Some of my text is not black (set by a character style) but citations processed by the word plug in are always reset to black.
It also overrides and resets other attributes such as visibility. I use visibility to exclude text from word count though I will print them in the end.

Thanks,
Marc