Converting scannable cites to another style in Word

jakobpersson

I got a document of cites in the "scannable" format which I'd like to convert to Harvard or APA.

My original plan was to use ODT and the RTF/ODF Scan add-on but LibreOffice's text formatting is still inferior to almost everything else so it seems I'll have to use Word or the fonts will be missing. This isn't just LO's fault, but also Scrivener's. The document was written in Scrivener and all references are "scannable cite" since I planned to use ODF to build the bibliography and do the final fixes.

Now that it's not possible, is there a way to replace these in Word, or do I have to manually replace them with another citation style by going through the entire documented in Scrivener and re-export to Word?

Any help would be much appreciated. I thought it would be easier :)

adamsmith

I don't quite understand the question, but the only way to do anything with Scannable Cites is to use LibreOffice, at least for the initial conversion.
You can then change the document to "Bookmarks" under Set Document Preferences, save it as doc and open it in Word and edit there.

jakobpersson

In my original text in Scrivener, all my citations are scannable so they look like so:

({ | Name, 1986 | | |zu:3872289:F5VW7KSB}).

But I'd like them to appear as they should in the final, for example:

(Name, 1986)

The only way to convert these scannable citations seems to be to use the ODF/RTF add-on. It will convert the scannable citations to fields that can be replaced with citations of a number of formats but it only works with ODF if you use scannable citations.

Problem is, exporting my document from Scrivener to ODF ruins the formatting and the aspect ratios of images (since I've used vector graphics).

I got the document looking decent in Word now and I figure replacing the citations manually is tedious but better than trying to format the text in LO. I might even be able to write a macro for replacing all these.

adamsmith

One thing you could try is to export from scrivener to .doc, open in LO, save as ODF and then run the scan. That might work better.

But as I said, LibreOffice is currently the only software that converts from the output produce by scanning scannable cites to actual citations, and ODF is the only format in which the scan runs, so there's no workflow that doesn't involve both the ODF format and LO at some point.

bwiernik

In theory, a version of the ODF scan plugin could be written to scan DOCX files instead, but no one has yet had the time to do so.

jakobpersson

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestions!

I wrote a regular expression and used advanced search and replace in Word (check "use wildcards"):

Find: \{ \| (*), ([0-9]{4})?\|*\|*\|zu:*?\}
Replace with: \1 (\2)

Will convert references such as the one above with Name (1986). References from the same year need to be handled manually to separate them (a, b, c and so on). When used in parenthesis, the format should be (Name, 1986). The regex isn't that smart.

Hopefully it saves someone some time.

kithairon

@jakobpersson: Try using the rtf export option from Scrivener rather than doc or odf. Then open in LibreOffice and save from there as odf. I don't quite understand what formatting is ruined, since Scrivener is not really a formatting tool (and you can compile on export in any number of ways). Can you not place your graphics at the layout stage in LO? Otherwise the procedure described here should still work.

jakobpersson

Hi,

I tried the RTF scan but it's not picking up my scannable references.

Word of advice to others on Mac: Don't use scannable references until you have confirmed that they work with Zotero and Word or Libre/OpenOffice.

bwiernik

@jakobpersson I think you are misunderstanding. The recommendation is not to use the built-in RTF scan, but rather the ODF scan plugin and to export from Scrivener to ODF via first exporting to RTF, then opening in LO and saving as ODF.