Can we automatically 'hyperlink' documents with the URL-field?

edited January 26, 2018
In footnotes (and/or bibliographies) In Word (or LibreOffice, or...), is it possible to have Zotero automatically put the URL field of a Zotero item as a hyperlink under the title of an article or a book? I do like the fact that readers can 'use' the URL to drill down to the article or book that was cited. But long URLs look terrible in footnotes and/or bibliographies; whereas hyperlinks do not...
  • No, sorry. The zotpress plugin for wordpress has that functionality, but nothing in zotero proper.
  • If this were a feature request ... would it make it on to the todo list?

    Specifically, for the Zotero MS Word Plugin, for an entry that has a URL have three options. Something like:

    1. Do nothing (as happens now)
    2. Whereever a style shows a url (whether in the citation or bibliography), that is turned into a (clickable) Word Hyperlink.

    E.g. In the citation (Author YYYY, http://www.example.com/page) this appears to the user as `(Author YYYY, http://www.example.com/page)` and only the URL is hyperlinked.

    3. The whole citation is hyperlinked. In the bibliography only the URL is hyperlinked.

    E.g. Imagining a different style is used, compared to that in 2. The whole citation `(Author YYYY)` would be hyperlinked.

    In this third case perhaps an additional option would make sense, the option between having the citation hyperlink jump to: the entry's location in the bibliography (or footnote?); versus the external address.

    I suppose the alternative to achieve all these effects, instead of having the Zotero Word Plug-in do anything, would be to write an independent Word macro that parses the whole document to manipulate the URLs as desired.
  • Nothing has changed in this respect.
  • It it just a matter of the priorities of labour among the core devs? I mean if I, or another volunteer, did the work might you accept a pull request?
  • We would accept a pull request for this, although ideally the functionality would cover both LibreOffice and Word. We cannot do this with Google Docs as it uses links to store citation IDs.
  • Thanks. I'll post back here if, after reviewing what's involved, I decide to start coding this.

    Yes I agree ideally any functionality should be mirrored in both the LibreOffice and Word plugin. However as a matter of process it might be that I'd get something working for Word and hand the torch off to someone else to implement the LibreOffice side of things. But if any of you core devs wish to object to that approach, preferring both to be done at once or not at all ... then let me know (such an objection is not necessarily unreasonable).

    Thanks for informing me that this is impossible to do with Google docs.
  • We want to avoid platform-specific features unless it's a limit of a platform itself, that goes for Zotero on different OSes or citing on different word processors. We would still accept a PR for Word-only, but ideally we'd want a comparable feature for LibreOffice too.

    Please post on https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/zotero-dev if you have development questions and we can discuss it further there.
  • So John - are we to assume that you've decided against pursuing this? I'm pretty sure that many of us are still hoping for sthg like this to materialize!
  • This would be very useful. To have any of the options from johnbentley's post https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/302943/#Comment_302943
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