The document “Untitled Bibliography.rtf” could not be opened.

pagliasofia

Hello, I have been using Zotero in 2011. However, since a week or so, the items exported in .rtf format from the Zotero.app in my MacBook can not be opened correctly. I receive an error message that 'The document “Untitled Bibliography.rtf” could not be opened.'. I re-installed Zotero but I get the same result. Why is it not working? I do not think I have changed anything of the settings lately to receive such an error. Besides, opening exported items in .bib format works perfectly.
Thanks in advance for any hep and support to help me solve this issue.

bwiernik

RTF is not an export format. It is essentially a word document, without any structured data. When you generate a bibliography in Zotero and save it as RTF, it creates formatted plain text references, not data Zotero can natively import (this is why it’s in the “Create Bibliography” section of the context menu, not the “Export Items” section.

See here for how to import formatted plain text bibliographies:
https://www.zotero.org/support/kb/importing_formatted_bibliographies

Note that export-import is almost never the correct method to do things in Zotero, as is not lossless (e.g., Date Added will change, links to Word/LibreOffice documents will be broken, Duplicates will be made). What exactly are you trying to do?

pagliasofia

Thank you for your quick reply. I use both the "Export item..." and the "Create bibliography form item..." function. In the latter, I select "Save as RTF", which Zotero executes correctly. I save the .rtf file on my desktop. The problem I am encountering now is that I get an error message from the built-in Mac TextEdit.app that "The document “Untitled Bibliography.rtf” could not be opened. I tried to open the file through Microsoft Word and it could open it, but I just got the name of the author and the year of publication.
Anyway I found why: In the "Create bibliography form item..." window, the Output Mode was set as "Citation" and not "Bibliography". Somehow I understand that maybe the "Citation" Output Mode is incompatible with the .rtf format as Output Method.

adamsmith

Except for the fact that TextEdit can't open the RTF (which I'd guess is there bug, not Zotero's), this is all as expected:

If you use "Create Bibliography" set to "Citation" for an author date style, you'd get Author and year in the generated RTF file, which it sounds like exactly what you saw opening the file in Word.

pagliasofia

Exactly, but I always created a .rtf file in Citation Mode so that I could get the whole citation.
TextEdit always opened .rtf files... only until a week ago. It definitely must be something related to TextEdit.