loss of formatting (Endnote X Import)

korona
Apologies if this topic has already been discussed -- I searched and did not find anything.

In EndNote X I used the "Abstract" field to store my own notes on articles/books. When importing (RefMan RIS) to Zotero, these notes turn into one long unformatted paragraph. All spaces between paragraphs / sections are lost -- though these spaces are present in the txt file Endnote kicks out.

Is there a way to export to Zotero and keep the formatting of my notes in my Endnote Abstract field?

Many thanks!
  • bdarcus
    edited December 8, 2008
    I'm not so sure Zotero is incorrect in its handling. Bibutils (which is generally quite faithful to the specs) also does not respect line-breaks in the RIS abstract (N2) field. Makes sense, since abstracts are just short strings of text; you shouldn't be using them for your notes.
  • korona
    bdarcus, thanks for the reply. I was afraid my sloppiness with EndNote might come back to haunt me.

    I imagine the best solution is to cut and paste my notes on the texts from the EndNote Abstract field to the Zotero Standalone Note.... unless someone knows of a more elegant solution.
  • dstillman
    Actually, the RIS translator does preserve line endings in N1/N2/AB fields, which is questionable in regard to the spec1 but done for EndNote compatibility. There was a bug in the version of the translator included with 1.0.7 that prevented this from working correctly, however, and the new version requires changes made since 1.0.7, so the new version hasn't been pushed to clients. Zotero 1.0.8, which we're hoping to get out this week, will include the fix.

    1 The RIS spec is pretty unhelpful here, since it allows optional newlines at the end of 70 characters but doesn't indicate whether clients should preserve other newlines (which would require counting the number of characters before newlines and would also lose legitimate newlines that happened to occur at exactly 70 characters).
  • korona
    Dan, this is great news. I look forward to 1.0.8.
  • dmedelstein
    Hate to rekindle an old subject, but does anybody know if this got lost between 1.0.8 and 1.5? I just imported an Endnote library into Zotero (I tried using both RIS and BibTex), and the line breaks in my Notes field were all lost in the import. I really don't feel like going through all those Notes and adding line breaks back in. . .
  • dstillman
    It looks like this regressed due to the switch to HTML-based notes in 1.5. Ticket created. We'll fix this for Beta 2. Thanks.

    Zotero is also now exporting notes to RIS (and other formats) as HTML, which is...questionable.
  • dmedelstein
    Cool. Thanks.
  • phineasgage
    Sorry to bring this back, but this problem seems to persist in the latest beta. I just tried importing my library from Papers, and all paragraph breaks in notes and abstract are lost, whether I import in RIS or Bibtex format.

    This is a bit of a show stopper with 500+ papers with notes to import. :)
  • mroberts1839
    I had the same problem.

    For a possible work-around, until the problem actually gets fixed, see: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/8673/losing-crs-on-import-from-endnote-zotero-bug/
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