Newbie With Annoying Problem

PoochJD

Hi,

Forgive me, please, as 1) I am a newbie; 2) I have Autism, and 3) I'm not very tech-literate.

Having recently completed a Masters Thesis, for reasons unknown Zotero (version 5.0.60) keeps inserting a truly annoying solid black line at the top of every page of my references, which are being inserted in MLA 8th Edition format.

I'm using Zotero with MS Word 2016 in MS Office Professional Plus 2016 (version 16.0.4738.1000) 64-bit version, on a Windows 10 laptop computer.

How do I remove these solid black lines? I can't see anything obvious, as to 1) why they are being inserted in the first place, and 2) how on earth I get rid of them. I've tried Googling online and in these forums, and got nothing thus far.

Your help would be hugely appreciated.

adamsmith

Never heard of this and Zotero is certainly not inserting black lines, though it could be there's some display bug.
Could you take a screenshot that shows this, post it to a free image hosting site (imgur.com, Dropbox, Google Drive) and link to it here?

DWL-SDCA

This sounds like a Word-styles setting where the reference pages have a rule-line at the top of each page (or at the bottom of each page header). I haven't used a recent version of word so I cannot guve you specific instructions other than this used to be accessed via the menu format/styles.

PoochJD

This is what is happening...

https://ibb.co/202VXs8

adamsmith

You're using Endnotes (or Footnotes?) and Word is inserting that line. You'd almost certainly see the same if you manually inserted endnotes. I think you should be able to find a Word setting to remove it, but Zotero has nothing to do with it.

(It's also a bit odd that you would insert MLA references in endnotes -- they're supposed to be in the text).

adomasven

The line is standard styling that Word adds for footnotes, whether inserted by the author (See "Insert Footnote" under References tab in Word), or by Zotero for citations. The line is very standard for footnotes in pretty much any writing, but you can remove it if you really want. See the last section of this article: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/delete-a-footnote-endnote-or-separator-4183cd36-a421-4dba-aa4c-fa511bba4b3f

PoochJD

1) Word shouldn't be inserting anything, the user hasn't asked the software to insert, even if Word thinks it should be there.

2) The fact Word does this, and then makes it very hard to remove it, without a lot of hassle, is also really poor. (Though I appreciate neither of these two points are related to Zotero.)

3) FYI, Adamsmith, how I do or don't do referencing, is not really for you to comment upon. I didn't ask anyone about whether my referencing style was right, wrong, or anything of the sort. So please don't comment on that. You're being judgemental, and this is what stops people from seeking help in online forums - because of unfair, unwarranted, unnecesary and unjust commentary from others, that is neither needed nor asked for.

@adomasven - Thank you for your help. As I mentioned in Points 1 and 2, Word shouldn't be inserting anything, without the user's direct approval.

This thread can now be closed.

adamsmith

No, I don't care how you do your references, but you were clearly a bit confused about what was going on (e.g. referring to footnotes as a reference list; otherwise we could have answered this immediately) so it was perfectly reasonable for me to wonder whether part of the problem was that you weren't using the right style or were using it incorrectly.

If you're happy with your references, that's perfectly fine.

(Also, see https://www.zotero.org/support/forum_guidelines#etiquette and assume good faith among people who are helping (!) you here)