Alternative Open-/ LibreOffice- Interface

norman_s

Zotero rocks! But the Addon for OpenOffice/ LibreOffice runs very unstable on my two pc's...

...and if the wordprocessor-plugin works fine, i can not really use it too. Its because i have to use LibreOffice's built-in bibliographic-feature (e.g. common management of citations, references, their author and so on to generate an auto-refreshing list of references for ALL documents of a project).

My idea is simple to direct connet to the Zotero-database and use LibreOffice built-in- bibliographic- function.
The citation-styles can't be used in this way - its a pitty but this is not important for me. The greatest advantage would be that the mentioned built-in function can be used and it doesn't breaks compatibility. Even Latex- +BibTex-export from LibreOffice would be work properly.

bdarcus

FWIW, I guess I'm still the co-project lead for the OOo bibliographic project (even if it's been dead for quite awhile), and I wouldn't recommend using the built-in tool. I've never had an issue with Zotero/OOo stability, so suggest you try to debug that instead.

noksagt

Agree with Bruce re. the superiority of Zotero over the built-in reference system. But that isn't to say that Zotero couldn't be used in that kind of workflow. The database design in Zotero seems a good deal smarter than the flat/limited database that LO/OO.o still needs. It may be possible to create a SQL VIEW that would work. But a reasonable work-around is to export your Zotero data. JabRef or refbase can be intermediaries:
http://jabref.sourceforge.net/help/OpenOfficeHelp.php
http://www.refbase.net/index.php/OO.o_Writer_integration

It might be reasonable to create a CSL for the tabular format used by the program (and it may fulfill the spreadsheet export that has been requested independently multiple times).

norman_s

Thanks for the good hints.

Actually i trying BIBUS (http://bibus-biblio.sourceforge.net) for LibreOffice- integration. It works well for me but i have to export & import my bibliograhic data from Zotero and Bibus after every change in Zotero.

The built-in bibliographic tools of LibreOffice are unfortunately not as good as Zotero (and i whish it would be more userfriendly and powerful) but it works - thanks for this.
I am using some Office-addons to enhance and complement features like BibTex- import, SVN-versioning (for version history and teamwork) and Mind-map- tools for brainstorming. Here the "Author-Support-Tools" (http://ast.informatik.uni-bremen.de/) are a great help for me.

Is it possible to enhance LibreOffice's native bibliograhic-functions and connect it to maybe a small version of Zotero?

norman_s

Since Zotero 3 (and the Zotero-Addon 3.5 for Open-/ LibreOffice.org) it works stable.
It works and looks really nice but it seems that citations are not marked something special while inserting. Therefore no one Zotero-citation is treated as an citation when exporting.

What had to be done to solve this ugly problem and how can I do it?

adamsmith

citation are inserted as reference marks (as they always have been). This works reliably and correctly - if it doesn't for you, please provide details and examples, I'm not sure I understand what problem you're experiencing.