problem with import of urls from bibtex

axl · November 23, 2008

I just discovered zotero and its really good. I just hit a problem however with importing bibtex databases made using other apps / web systems like Jabref, Connotea etc. This involves articles from NASA ADS (thats all I have tried so far...). Take for example the reference Antonucci 1984, which has URL

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984ApJ...278..499A

this exports correctly, but when imported from a .bib file I get

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984ApJ⋯278..499A

Then the nice "view" button in the right hand pane doesn't work - this is very annoying, as its a key feature for browsing one's library. This problem seems to hit a lot of ADS URLs but not all - haven't tried to look for the pattern yet.

dstillman · November 23, 2008

I've removed the "midline horizontal ellipsis" character mapping from the BibTeX translator. You can make this fix yourself using Scaffold, or you can wait for 1.0.8 or the next 1.5 release.

And, of course, in references you've already imported, you can just replace the horizontal ellipses with three periods.

noksagt · November 23, 2008

When we write out BibTeX, we send the URL field through with no replacement characters. Maybe the right thing to do is to perform a more limited replacement on imported BibTeX as well?

axl · November 23, 2008

coo that was quick - many thanks. Unfortunately re-inserting three dots by hand doesn't always work, cos the number of dots in an ADS bibcode varies (don't ask). So I took a deep breath, installed this Scaffold thingy and cut out the lines you mentioned, worried of course that I didn't really know what I was doing .. But it worked, so I am a happy bunny. I look forward to the next release when this works seamlessly for regular astronomers, as opposed to dangerous semi-geeks like me.

I would really like to be able to edit the bibtex citekey, but I see that discussion is active elsewhere....