Disappearing Italics in bibliography (MLA)

iselim

@ fbennett

I have got the same problem with disappearing italics and could locate the citation causing it. I further had a look in the Error Console, which shows the following message:

Fehler: this._editor is undefined
Quelldatei: chrome://zotero/content/bindings/styled-textbox.xml
Zeile: 185

Could this help?

fbennett

@iselim,

This is valuable stuff, thanks for reporting. It will be helpful if you can provide a few more details about your environment. Specifically:

• Indicate the locale that you are you running Zotero with; and
• Export the bad item as Zotero RDF, paste the text of the export to http://gist.github.com/, save it as a public gist, and post the URL from the browser address bar back here.

With that information, I may be able to reproduce the problem here, which will be the first step toward clearing this up.

iselim

I am using Zotero 2.1.8 with Mac Word 2008 (Mac Word plugin 3.1.5).
RDF export of the item causing the glitch: https://gist.github.com/1124949

Was that correct?

fbennett

The RDF needed a little patching up, but I've been able to import that data. Thanks for that.

By "locale" I meant to ask about the language in which you are running Zotero (i.e. English, German, French, etc.)

fbennett

It would also be good to know which style is producing the error.

iselim

I'm running it in German (although I'd rather have it in English, got to figure this out later) and us MLA

Simon

This is the ultimate cause. I'll see if there's a workaround.

fbennett

Crikey, I would never have guessed.

Steve milhist

I have had this same issue, and after reading the link on Simon's 5 Aug post, the imposition of styles in Word seems to be the problem.

My setup is as follows: Chicago style, Zotero 2.18, Firefox 4.01, Word 2002, Winword Integration 3.1.1

The first entry in a bibliography in a document I have is a book with a long title. Chicago style dictates this title should be italic, but the entire bibliography has no italics. As per the post above, I assume Word is imposing a paragraph style on the bibliography because more than half the first paragraph is italic?

As a workaround, if I insert a dummy reference in the paper that will appear first in the bibliography alphabetically, and which contains few italics, then the italics reappear in the entire bibliography. It seems if the first line/paragraph of the bibliography contains more than half italics, Word overrides the formatting in the entire bibliography.

Rintze

@Simon, I was wondering if it would be possible/desirable to hack around this Word problem, where abundant italics in the first bibliographic entry/paragraph mess up the formatting. Could the word processor plugin precede the first paragraph by some invisible characters without markup, such as a bunch of zero-width spaces?

Maybe this could only be done under conditions where the Word problem appears (i.e. when more than half the string is in italics/bold/etc.)? Perhaps it would also be possible to delete these characters once Word's bibliography style has been applied to the bibliography?