changed to APA style, notes & black brackets appearing in strange places

Larisa

Hiya

I'm using Zotero Standalone with Word on a macbook pro to edit an article.

I converted the notes to APA style, and now big black squarebrackets appeared all over the document. Sometimes they bracket an in-text note, and sometimes they appear around edits I have made or in the middle of sentences and they appear around some of my section headings as well.

Also, a whole bunch of notes just appeared in-text at the beginning of my document that are supposed to be from later on in the document. what is happening?

adamsmith

could you clarify what you mean by "converted the notes to APA style"? What exactly did you do?

Also, a screenshot would be helpful, post it to any free image hosting site like imgur.com and link to it here

Larisa

After creating the document (converting it from Scrivener into a RTF and then a Word doc), I went into the Zotero menu and selected "set document preferences" and then selected the style I wanted.

I will upload a screenshot shortly, thank you.

adamsmith

If you used RTF scan (and not the ODF scan plugin) you would not be able to do anything with Zotero Set Document Preferences. RTF Scan produces formatted citations, not Zotero citations.

Larisa

I don't know what RTF Scan is. or the ODF scan plugin?

how I have worked with Zotero before, is that I have started with a document. Sometimes with a few regular citations (put in using Word), sometimes with none.

Then I open Zotero, and set document preferences so that I have the format I want. then I go through and start inserting citations using Zotero, deleting any pre-existing footnotes that I had before.

The main thing I'm wondering about is these brackets. They seem to be impossible to delete, and to move around if I try to delete them.

dstillman

What version of Word is this? These brackets sound like a bug in earlier versions of Word—unrelated to Zotero—that would occur if you had text highlighted and switched to another program (which would happen while using the Zotero plugin). Word would actually create special bookmarks, which you'd have to delete manually via the Word bookmark manager. Not sure if this still occurs in 2008/2011 or what specifically caused it. It may not have occurred in a default installation.

adamsmith

also, if you're working with Scrivener, see here:
https://github.com/Zotero-ODF-Scan/zotero-odf-scan

Larisa

Just returning to say thanks for the link.

SO I looked at the list of bookmarks (which you get to through going to "insert" then "bookmark" - even if you are not inserting one but trying to delete it). The bookmarks appear to be named after the headings in Zotero in the left sidebar. I guess it is a word bookmark thing but they never appeared before that moment that I converted all my footnotes.

Also, Word only seems to allow one to delete one bookmark at a time which is tedious. Just FYI