Numerical sorting using the issue column

nicoferfio

Hello everyone. I'm not sure if this is the right place for this discussion, if not, please enlighten me.

I noticed that, when displaying the "issue" column in Zotero, and using it to sort the items, it uses an alphabetical sorting instead of a numerical one. Is there a way for the 10's to appear after the 9's instead of the 1's? Right now I have very late issues (rangin in the hundreds) with the very low ones because of this.

I'm not sure whether I'm asking how to do something, whether I'm requesting the feature to be implemented in Zotero, or whether I'm just complaining :P

Thanks in advance.

aurimas

There's currently no way for an end-user to fix this. It would have to be implemented in Zotero. (so you're making a feature request). I think it makes sense and should be implemented for other numeric fields as well.

adamsmith

(I thought there was even a ticket for that. There's definitely an old thread I have bookmarked as something worth looking at.)

aurimas

Probably this: https://www.zotero.org/trac/ticket/1031

dstillman

This should work now in the latest 4.0 Beta. It's currently implemented for all fields — I'm not sure whether it's necessary to be selective about the fields it's applied to.

fbennett

In bibliographies and citations, the citation processor (citeproc-js) will now sort numeric field content numerically. That is, "Book 11" will sort after (not before) "Book 2".

The change will arrive in Zotero when citeproc-js is next updated. Meanwhile, you can check out the new sort behaviour by installing the processor patch plugin (Zotero for Firefox only).

Thanks for this fix go to @aurimas for pointing me at the relevant portion of the ECMAScript specification (and, of course, to the folks who ride herd over the ECMAScript specification itself).

(This note is outside the proper topic of this thread, but may be of interest to people searching the forums for numeric sorting issues.)