rtf scan not working

watdryhope

hi all,

I'm a little confused as to the RTF scan function. I've saved a document from scrivener as an rtf file. throughout the document I've utilized the formats {Last name Page numer} or {Last name, "Article"/Book title Page number}. However, when I run the RTF scan, firstly it does not show any citations in the "Verify cited items" window. It also does not succesfully scan the citations once I run it. Any help?

bwiernik

You need to use one of the formats listed here:
https://www.zotero.org/support/rtf_scan

Generally, I’d recommend using the ODF Scan plugin, which is much more robust than the built-in RTF Scan feature.

watdryhope

sorry if above wasn't clear, but that's what I had been doing. For whatever reason, Zotero's RTF scan doesn't work. I can the ODT scan to work, but this means I have to work in ODT, and I'm not as comfortable in it as I am in Word.

Do we have any idea whether Zotero will ever fully integrate with Scrivener and have a Macro similar to the one in Word? Since so many people seem to use it for academic writing I'm sure it would be a boon for Zotero's userbase.

Thanks

bwiernik

You could try this workflow—

1. Export to ODF and use ODF Scan
2. In LibreOffice, change the Zotero document preferences to store citations as Bookmarks and save as DOCX.
3. Open the document in Word, Change the citations to Fields, and finish formatting your document.

watdryhope

Thanks bwiernik I'll give it a shot. After an hour or so of using OpenOffice it seems to be fine actually. I was worried it wouldn't be as intuitive as Word but it seems ok.

watdryhope

Just another question, if I may. The ODF scan seems to work quite well with the scannable cite, but I notice that if I have two sources by the same author, it comes up with the name of the article or book--as it should--but this isn't in inverted commas or italics, as they should be. I'm working in MLA when this happens, and I notice that if I change to Chicago the formatting of the titles seems to work fine there. I was wondering if there was a way to fix this?

adamsmith

The styles should be independent of ODF scan, but anyway -- could you given an example? I don't follow, I'm afraid.

watdryhope

Hi,

For example, say I cite two articles by Kim Hall, and when I scan them they'll come out like this.

(Hall, Othello was my grandfather 23)
(Hall, Things of Darkness 48)

My point being is that the scan is recognizing that I've cited two sources from the same author, but the first is an article and as such would usually be in inverted commas (Hall, "Othello was my grandfather" 23); and the second would be in italics as it's a book. I know that Zotero knows this information, since when I look at my paper in Chicago style, the footnotes of the sources have the proper format (e.g. the article name is in inverted commas, and book titles are italicized).

I also have one more related question. Is it possible to get "Scannable Cite" as a style in Word/OpenOffice. I'm keen to migrate some already written papers, which I have written in Word and used Zotero, and copy them into Scrivener. It would be great to change the citation style to Scannable Cite, so when I copy paste to Scrivener, and keep editing the papers, I will be in a form readily scannable when I finish the project and use the ODT scan.

Thanks!