Upgrade StorageBroken document due to reference in image caption
At first: zotero is great! It helps me a lot and saves a hell of time.
If this isn't already known I might have found a bug: I've inserted a reference within an image caption see here: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/830/zotero.png/
After this I've got a lot of error messages each time I was trying to add another reference. Although zotero still was working! (but it was very annoying to click all those messages away).
So anyway I followed the advice to isolate the problematic citation and found it.
If this isn't already known I might have found a bug: I've inserted a reference within an image caption see here: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/830/zotero.png/
After this I've got a lot of error messages each time I was trying to add another reference. Although zotero still was working! (but it was very annoying to click all those messages away).
So anyway I followed the advice to isolate the problematic citation and found it.
Now I know that this isn't allowed but if you DON'T know this and just do it you'll run into this situation.That's why I thought it would be useful for other users to know.
Maybe the "How To in case of broken docs" should contain a list of such "DON'Ts" ?
Is it planned to support citations in captions or is there a major technical difficulty preventing it? It doesn't seem that too many people run into this though, I often use diagrams and images from others that just need referencing though.
Not the nicest side of it :( - but the word plugin should state very clearly that it is limited... and not only say so on the troubleshooting page.
I certainly didn't expect any limitations in that regard, a shame.
PS:
somehow the free competition manages to get this done with their word-plugins though. Pity. This out of nowhere is THE top feature on my feature-wishlist for zotero. I haven't written a single paper without copied material in images that need citations.
If you're switching to Mendeley (which isn't free, it just doesn't cost any money) for its Word integration feature, you're likely in for a bad surprise. It's not very good. Among the limitations that they don't advertise is the fact that it's still not possible to create citations like Smith (1776) in author-date style.
The limitation on image captions is rather small, and it can in many cases be avoided by using the quick cite function-- just set the Quick Cite style in the Zotero preferences, then drag and drop the reference into your caption (hold down shift for an in-text citation). You can then add the item to the finished bibliography with "Edit Bibliography". This will mean that the citation won't update automatically and it won't be numbered or show ibid behavior as expected, but the latter two are poorly defined for items not in the main text anyway.
The documentation could provide more detail on what to do as a workaround, but it's hard to see this being more than a minor annoyance.
(edit: as an aside, though - which publisher requires you to actually use word processor captions for your titles? Every journal/publisher I have ever submitted to wants figures and their captions as files separate from the article text)
This has different implications for manuscript prep and for "photo-ready" production.
With ms prep , as adamsmith suggests above, figures are handled separately from the ms body. The author cannot know exactly where within the text the figure will appear and so cannot (for numbered styles) always get the order right. For example in the ms:
....As figure 1 demonstrates, the relationship is linear until 1990 but approaches exponential as electronicly published documents become more common.
Figure 1. Title
-------------
include figure 1 about here
--------------
The caption text with reference marks goes here within the body of the ms text.
With a numbered style the order is completely outside the author's control -- the figure could appear in print on a different page from the referral within body text. Fixing this should be the responsibility of the journal's copy edit process (and the author during proof).
If the effort is to produce photo-ready copy, given the current state of word processing software, the author will always need to do quite a bit of manipulation of the text to make the document attractive. This manipulation will probably occur after the Zotero marks have been removed. Again, tedious renumbering may be needed. Until Zotero works well with document layout software, it seems to me that there will always be a need for final editing after Zotero has done its job.
To sum up, I would rather Zotero focus on improving other things that affect bibliography management and writing workflow than to try to compensate for the shortcomings of other software. Particularly so when, as here, forces outside the control of the author and writing tools supercede.
It is only a problem if your citations style asks for numbering. It wouldn't be any problem if the citation style was something like
- (andybrandy, 1990)
- Brandy1990
- Bra90
This + ordering the citations alphabetically in the bibliography should work with ANY document and order.So. Could the developers not just allow inserting citations with the hint that only certain citation styles can be used in the case?!
2. For those styles, just adding the items using quick copy as noted by ajlyon above isn't hard. You can add them to the bibliography using edit bibliography
3. The ability to switch citation styles is an important and crucial feature of csl and Zotero - you really don't want to introduce a "feature" that breaks that for some citation styles.
In Word, we don't get the fields from text boxes automatically, so this would require larger changes. I'm not convinced it's worth spending the time to implement this there, since it's going to be perpetually broken.
This seems a reasonable workaround, if it works.