Disappearing footnote italics in NeoOffice

mtai33

I use NeoOffice 2015.12 Classic Edition with Mac Sierra 10.12.5 along with Zotero 4.0.29.20 and Firefox 50.0.3

The Italics on footnotes imported from Zotero disappear whenever I close and reopen a NeoOffice file. This is very frustrating. I noticed this problem after upgrading to Sierra (meanwhile, I have also upgraded to Oracle JDK).

I tried a little experiment and discovered that the italics in the footnotes vanish only if the footnote is imported from Zotero. If I type the footnote manually, the italics remain (after closing and reopening the file).

One way to get around the problem is to import the footnote using Zotero as usual, but then delete and retype the italicized text (e.g. book title) manually. It won't work if you remove and reapply the italics using [Ctrl + i]. You have to delete the italicized text and retype it.

Please help. I love NeoOffice and prefer not to switch to MS Word (which doesn't seem to have this problem). Thanks.

bwiernik

The issue is that manual changes to text formatting in Zotero footnotes are lost when the citations are refreshed.

What exactly are you trying to italicize in the footnotes? The best way to do this depends on what you are trying to italicize.

If you are having to italicize book titles, it sounds like there might be an error in the style you are using. What style is that?

mtai33

Turabian/Chicago style. I didn't have problems before. Book titles appear italicised like they should when I import them from my Zotero library into my NeoOffice document. So far so good. But once I close the file and reopen it, the book titles appear non-italicised i.e. as regular fonts (in my case Times New Roman)

bwiernik

Does inserting a new Zotero citation or clicking the Zotero Refresh button fix the problem or no?

mtai33

Clicking the Refresh icon doesn't fix the problem, but If I click the Edit Citation icon and hit the "OK button, it restores the italics. However, once I close and reopen the file, the book title goes back to regular fonts (loses italics).

Inserting additional Zotero citations doesn't fix the problem either.

Somehow closing and reopening the file turns italics back to regular fonts.

Interestingly, the italics in the bibliography are not affected (only those in the footnotes of Chicago Manual Style 16th edition (full note)).

I thought this might be a NeoOffice bug but manually written footnote citations retain their italics (after closing and reopening the file).

I only noticed this problem occurring recently (possibly after I upgraded to Mac OS Sierra).

adomasven

LibreOffice has some weird issues to do with retaining formatted text in ReferenceMarks, which we work around in our plugin. I would not be surprised if NeoOffice has a more severe version of the same issue. Since NeoOffice has not seen a proper update for 2 years, we won't be recommending using it with the release of Zotero 5.0. The plugin should remain functional as long as NeoOffice is compatible with the current version of LibreOffice, but we will not be putting in additional effort to make it compatible.

That said, the easiest fix in this case is to switch to LibreOffice.

bwiernik

I've never seen this behavior reported before, so I'm thinking that it might be a bug with NeoOffice. Let's try two things. First, in the Zotero Document Preferences, change from Reference Marks to Bookmarks. Does that fix the issue?

If, for testing purposes, can you try to install LibreOffice and see if the bug occurs there? The plugin was designed for use with LibreOffice, and it's possible there is a bug in NeoOffice's implementation of the reference marks or plugins features that aren't present in LO. If that's the case, it might be possible to fix it, or it might be something NeoOffice would need to fix.

(If you don't have a strong preference between NeoOffice and LibreOffice, the latter does tend to be updated with big fixes and new features more frequently.)

mtai33

Zotero Document Preferences does not allow Bookmarks for Chicago Manual of Styles 16th edition (full note); it allows bookmarks only for author-note.

I just tried LibreOffice, and it works fine. No problem with italics disappearing.

Many thanks.

bwiernik

Yeah, so I'd recommend using LibreOffice, since it seems like there is some sort of bug in NeoOffice's implementation.