Libre Office Writer plugin - character style for in-line references

TobiasLunte

Is there a way for Zotero to automatically apply a character style to in-line citations with the LO-plugin?

I use Elsevier - Harvard (with titles) and usually like author-date citations because they give some info right in text. However, they can be pretty ungainly to read in sections with lots of references, esp. related work. Because of this, I'd like to display them in a lighter grey than the surrounding text. Is there some way to have Zotero apply a character style to the in-line citations just like it applies a paragraph style to the bibliography? (Possibly by editing the citation style?)

Thanks and bw,

adamsmith

No, sorry, not possible.

TobiasLunte

Is that a deliberate choice, or would that be an interesting feature? It seems self-contained enough that I could try implementing it if a pull-request would be welcome.

adamsmith

For citation styles, we just consider font color out of scope for a citation style and would be unlikely to accept this as a change to CSL, so deliberate on that end.

On the Zotero end, I think this is actually not technically possible as LibreOffice styles (in the sense of "default, Heading 1, etc.") are applied at the paragraph level.

TobiasLunte

Libreoffice supports both paragraph styles and character styles (which can be applied to spans within a paragraph).
The idea would be to create a new, empty character style "Reference", that is automatically applied to all citations by Zotero when they are placed. Being empty, this style should have exactly zero impact on its own, inheriting all attributes from the current paragraph style. However, if the user decides to, they can modify the style to overwrite attributes of the references, such as font color, italics or superscript.

adamsmith

I didn't realize LO did that -- that's nice. I don't have much insight on the word processor integration (that's mostly @adomasven ) but in the past, feature parity between Word and LO has been a relatively big priority. It's just a mess to keep explaining/documenting "you can do this in LO but not in Word" and vice versa. And I'm pretty sure Word doesn't have the equivalent of character styles.

adomasven

This is technically possible and probably doesn't impact LO/Word compatibility much, but it's a fairly niche request. A pull request is very welcome, however. If you decided to go for this, feel free to post on our dev mailing list for a more technical discussion.

bwiernik

In (at least recent versions of) Word, it's also possible to apply a paragraph style to a text selection separately from the rest of the paragraph. This seems to function the same way that LO character styles do. It might be possible then to implement this across both word processors.