Word-plugin: Select text and then click "Add/Edit citation"

drseb
Dear Zotero-Community,

congrats for a fantastic software.

I would like to suggest/ask something. When I select parts of my text in MS Word and click "Add/Edit citation", the Zotero plugin will remove the selected text and replace it with the citation I introduce. Is this intended behaviour or am I doing something wrong? For me personally, it would be better to not delete the selected text.

Related to that issue is: Would it be possible to pre-populate the search-bar that is shown upon clicking "Add/Edit citation" with the selected text? Again, for me personally, this would simplify my workflow. I am not saying it is a must-have for everyone, but it would be cool if this could be an option in the plugin that a user can activate at their own will.

Let me know what you think and please point me to previous discussions if there were any. I wasn't successful in finding any.

Thanks,
Sebastian
  • adomasven
    The only meaningful operation when clicking add/edit citation with some selected text is to remove it, since this is the default behaviour for word processors - any other write operation over selected text overwrites it.

    Populating the searchbar with the selected text could be a nice feature, although only useful if you're converting an existing document with manually entered citations. If you're writing a document with Zotero from scratch, this should never be needed. You can manually achieve this workflow by selecting the text, copying it, clicking add/edit citation and pasting it into the searchbar, which shouldn't be a big hassle if you use keyboard shortcuts for copying and pasting.
  • drseb
    Ok. I agree with you on the first point re overwriting, but don't understand what you mean by "should never be needed". I think this feature would be an extremely user-friendly feature, especially when you're writing from scratch.
    I know several people that by intuition selected the text phrases that their citation is referring to and most of them were telling me that a pre-filled searchbar would cool.
    But ok - everybody has different usages, priorities, and views on UI interactions.

    Thanks anyway,
    Sebastian
  • adomasven
    Right, I guess if you select the title or keyword of an item you are planning to cite, then it does make sense. But that still does not solve the problem of what to do with the selected text and where the new citation should be inserted. The citation could be appended at the end of the selection, but this shouldn't be the default behaviour either. We could support it with a preference, but with the current architecture of word processor plugins there is no easy way to implement it. I don't remember ever seeing requests for this, which means that the demand currently would not justify the amount of work needed to add such feature.

    As always, anyone is welcome to comment in support of this and we will re-evaluate its viability down the road.
  • drseb
    Yes, I feared that the amount of work required to implement this will be too much. Thank you anyway and maybe let's discuss it again, when more users show interest in such a feature.

    Thanks,
    Sebastian

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