[Bug] not able to export Notes to Biblatex

cb102 · March 31, 2017

When exporting a single note-entry to Biblatex the resulting bib-file is empty.

When exporting an entry which is just a PDF file the resulting bib-files is empty.

I understand why. Biblatex doesn't support that type of entry.

But this shouldn't happen that way. When there are entries that are not able to export to the selected export-format (in my case Biblatex) there should be a warning message about it.

And for Notes you maybe could create own entry-types in Biblatex.

adamsmith · March 31, 2017

I think the current behavior is fine (and most certainly not a bug; please don't label things as bugs that are really feature or UX requests) -- beyond the fact that we don't have a good way to display warnings, I'm not really sure why we'd need it. I don't think people would or should expect standalone notes to export into BibTeX or BibLaTeX, which, after all, is a format for generating citations&bibliographies (and Zotero doesn't use notes in those, either). You're certainly the first person to ask for this.

cb102 · March 31, 2017

> the fact that we don't have a good way to display warnings

How do you mean that? There are modal dialogs sometimes in Zotero.

adamsmith · March 31, 2017

yeah, but they can't be easily triggered from the import translators. Also, this should probably not pop up every time you try to import (that'd get rather annoying), so we'd need a "don't show again" checkbox. There would probably be ways to do this, but I'd have to be very convinced of its merits to put any time into that (which I'm not, as per the rest of my post).