Change many suffixes at once

JMachielsen

Hello everyone,

This is my first post. I have searched the forum but haven't found an answer to this, I hope there is an easy answer to this. The problem I have is the following: In the book manuscript I'm working on I'm citing quite a number of multi-volume works. In the style guide I'm following, it should look something like: ..., ii, p. 12 or ..., iii, p. 34, or iv, p. 56, etc. However, when I started work on the project I missed out the 'p.' when I entered this into the suffix field. Similarly, there are quite a number of references in the document to "r" and "v" which need to be spelled out as recto and verso.

I could search and replace in Word but that might be dangerous and I would risk losing all the changes if I need to tweak the style I have written for this. In Endnote there was always the feature to 'uncode' the formatting. You would see something like {author@ii, 20}. Is there anyway to get to the same point in Zotero? Or any other suggestions as to how could easily make these changes? I have 1300 footnotes so far... Going through them one by one would not be fun.

Thanks everyone!
Jan

aurimas

What citation style are you using? Sounds like you've been entering volume/page numbers by hand? I think generally this should have been handled automatically by the style, which would also have made it easy to change this for all citations.

In Endnote there was always the feature to 'uncode' the formatting. You would see something like {author@ii, 20}. Is there anyway to get to the same point in Zotero?

Try Alt+F9 to show field codes. The field codes are quite large though, but you can probably do some sort of search and replace.

I'm not sure what you mean about r and v. Did you enter these manually in Word or in Zotero or are they coming from the style?

adamsmith

I can't unfortunately, think of any good solution to this.
Are you writing in Word or LibreOffice?
In LO there might a possibility to do the equivalent of uncode with a new plugin, but that won't work for Word.

Search&replace wouldn't be particularly risky (at least not if you were able to use a smart search function, but yes, you'd lose those changes when switching the citation style.

edit: yes, what Aurimas says about field codes in Word could work - I'd test this with a subsection, though - these aren't intended for manual editing.

aurimas

It's a bit tricky, but I think it's possible. At least the following worked for me in Word 2010:

1. Show field codes by pressing Alt+F9


2. Open Search and Replace dialog


3. Click the More>> button


4. Check "Use wildcards"


5. In the search field type:
   ([ivx]{1,4}, )([0-9]{1,5})


6. In the replace field type:
   \1p. \2
   


7. You'll probably want to do Find Next, Replace instead of Replace All to make sure you don't replace something you don't want to.
   
   Alternatively, you can try turning on "Track Changes", then "Replace All", then glancing through the changes and Rejecting anything that was incorrectly replaced.


8. Hide field codes by pressing Alt+F9


9. Switch citation styles (probably to another note style) and then back to whatever you were using to force Zotero to refresh citation content

The suffix appears 3 times in each citation. Once in the formatted reference, once in the plain text reference, and once in the suffix field. I think they all have to match or else Zotero freaks out and says that the reference was corrupted. I think it should just re-generate the reference instead of making you re-link it from the library. Especially if the only thing mismatching is the suffix or prefix, but that's a discussion for a different thread.

JMachielsen

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I've just tried this out on a small portion of the text and it works. A life saver! Thanks all!