Easy editing of document elements

lostindysnomy

While I find Zotero to be the best management software for importing citation information, when the citation information is incorrectly formatted to begin with, or if I must create my own citation, it's much harder to enter or edit this information in Zotero than Endnote. If it were just a click and fill field, it would be less of a headache. Currently, I feel I spend a lot of time entering in some info, switching my view to see the original citation, then having to click back in and find my spot to enter the rest. Sometimes this occurs 15 times per document because of the original citation being so messed up. Couldn't the editing stay current when switching between programs? Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

adamsmith

Couldn't the editing stay current when switching between programs? Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

honestly, no. But from what it sounds like, this: http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/citation_styles/reference_test_pane could help you a lot in what you're trying to do.

lostindysnomy

I'm not tech savvy enough for the last recommendation. Maybe I'm just explaining wrong? When you click to edit say the journal title for an article in Zotero, you can type whatever, but in the middle of the title say you need to check out another window to check the title name. If you do, you have to click back into the title and unselect the previous text you entered so it doesn't overwrite what you just wrote. In Endnote you just click on the field and fill it in, switch between windows and it doesn't matter because when you come back to the endnote window the cursor is in the same spot as when you left. I know this is a minor problem, but it gets annoying when you are trying to transfer a couple of years of references into a database for future use.

aurimas

May I ask where you are transferring your database from? If you need to do so much editing or manual entry, it sounds like something is not working well for you in Zotero

adamsmith

Well, the suggestion was just to allow you to "live" preview citations - that's what the test pane can help you do - but that's not actually the issue, apparently.

For keeping the cursor active - I think that might just be a limitation of the XULrunner framework Zotero is built on (also not sure how desirable that would be, as you could more easily lose editing and accidentally edit fields).
But why are you manually inserting data - apart from what Aurimas says, which is very much the first question to ask, couldn't you just copy&paste?

fbennett

I have run into this myself also. It's a minor annoyance, but I agree that it would be handy to have a (configurable) setting that allows "sticky" editing focus on a field in the Info panel. Even when copying fields in with c&p, it would definitely be handy to be able to tab to the next field after switching back, instead of hunting it down with the mouse.

I think it could be done using an observer, although one would need to be careful to avoid unexpected side effects.