Group library snapshots not showing up in right character encoding

michelhockx

I have put together a fairly extensive group library of snapshots of Chinese websites, many of them unavailable in other archives. When I open the snapshots in Firefox with my local copy of Zotero, they show up absolutely fine. But when I open them in the Group Library (regardless of what browser I use), they show up in the wrong encoding and I have to manually change the character encoding to Simplified Chinese. I would like to share my library with other scholars but if they have to manually change the encoding for every page, it will be cumbersome.

The Chinese shows up fine in the list in the Group Library, and in the title of the attachments. Just when you open the attachment, it becomes on-screen gibberish. Does anyone know what can be done to prevent this?

dstillman

This is in the online library, you mean? Can you give the 8-character itemKey from the end of a few of these? They'll look something like "ABCD2345". I don't need the full URL.

michelhockx

For instance: AHXDF8NZ and 7T3DV24K .

It does not seem to happen for all snapshots, by the way. Offline they all look fine.

Perhaps you need to be group member to see these. If so, let me know.

dstillman

OK, you're right — definitely not working. The files server is claiming pages are UTF-8 in all cases, which is overriding the 'gbk' charset specified in the HTML.

We're rolling out some updates to the attachment viewing functionality in the next week or so, so I'll make sure we address this at the same time. I'll post here once that's out.

michelhockx

Thanks, Dan. I'd like for this Group Library to be a companion website for my book, due out later this year.

By the way is there any way to make the material available publicly (including the snapshots) without people having to join the group? I realize normally there is no file storage for open groups, but wondered if there was a way around that.

dstillman

No way around that, I'm afraid. (And if those pages are under copyright and you're not the author, you quite possibly wouldn't have the rights to redistribute them publicly anyway. That's part of the reason we don't allow this.)

michelhockx

Good point! Thanks.

dstillman

To clarify, though, you can of course make the library itself public and allow people to view it without joining the group — the group just can't have files if you make it open.

If you hosted the snapshots elsewhere (Dropbox, Amazon S3, etc.) you could attach links to them, though it'd be a bit harder to manage. For each snapshot in the client, you'd have to do Show File, upload the directory somewhere, view it in the browser, attach a link to the same item in Zotero, and then delete the local snapshot.

michelhockx

Yes, I understand. I'll run it is a closed group in the first instance, see what kind of interest there is after the book comes out, and then take it from there. Would be great if the encoding issue could be sorted!

Thanks again for all your very helpful replies. Zotero has been a tremendous help in the process of researching and writing this book, which will be gratefully acknowledged!

dstillman

OK, let us know if you're still seeing the encoding issue. (You might, but for a different reason specific to that encoding.)

michelhockx

Still the same issue, I'm afraid. Not for all snapshots of Chinese sites, just some of them. They show up fine in Zotero itself, regardless of which computer I use, but they don't show up correctly in the Group Library that I copied them into.

dstillman

How about now?

michelhockx

It works! Thank you so much, Dan!