Problem with citation hyperlinks and URLs in Word

chiarinad

Hi!
I am having trouble with URLs failing to become hyperlinks in citations in Word. We didn't have a problem with this before, someone in our group just noticed it.
From my preliminary investigations on the forum I understand that:

1) CSL is not 'producing' hyperlinked URLs, it is a function of Word AutoFormat.
2) We cite in footnotes and you can not run "AutoFormat now" in footnotes.
3) I read that Word made some security changes recently that produced some error messages; we didn't get any messages but I disabled any File Blocking just as an experiment and it didn't make any difference.

I also noticed that

4) If you break the links between the citations and zotero and then insert a space after the URL, AutoFormat kicks in and makes a hyperlink but doesn't if the citation-zotero link is live.

I know this may be a Word issue but I was wondering if anyone can help shed light on the matter? Everyone is groaning at the prospect of having to manually hyperlink all their URLS as a workaround! Thanks!

adamsmith

I don't have a solution, but pretty sure this has nothing to do with the recent RTF security issues. You're sure this worked before?

chiarinad

Hi! I went back and checked more old reports and in fact you are right, I don't think that URLs in linked citations ever were automatically hyperlinked - I was misled by the fact that sometimes we insert some citations in the footnotes by hand as well as by using Zotero as we don't store every webpage we cite in Zotero, especially if it's a portal to online data or something like that. Anyway, so the hyperlinked URLs only appear in the manually created citations - and that's what gave us the impression that it was working before. So I guess that the only way to get the hyperlinks to appear is to unlink the citations and then trigger AutoFormat by inserting a space after the URL.
Sorry for the misunderstanding!