Developments Zotero Indesign

plafont

Science writers are gradually abandoning Word in favour of Indesign. Have there been any developments about the import of zotero bibliographic references directly into indesign? Citations in the text and creation of a bibliography?

fmuro

Real writers use LaTeX.

damnation

I would say that "science writers" are moving to more collaborative writing tools such FidusWriter, F1000Workspace or just Google Docs. But InDesign? Quite a cumbersome tool to write and annotate/edit.

plafont

The collaborative dimension is not a concern for these users (very small team). They prefer the Indesign software for its functionalities of integration of complex visuals and maps. The questioning of the institutional choice made for this software is not the subject of my research. This one consists in providing them with an operational answer if it exists.

adamsmith

There's this: https://github.com/ka1/zot2indd
I haven't tested it and am not aware of active users nor of any other active efforts in this direction

(I think the misunderstanding was that you seemed to imply that the move to InDesign was a general trend in science, which is indeed very much not the case)

plafont

Thank you for this return, which I had indeed spotted. So no other alternative than to use Latex like syntax and a zotero file with a modified .bib extension

bwiernik

An approach I might recommend is to use Zotero and BetterBibTeX to insert pandoc/Markdown citations. pandoc can convert from Markdown to InDesign formats:
https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/wiki/Importing-Markdown-in-InDesign

https://networkcultures.org/digitalpublishing/2014/10/08/markdown-to-indesign-with-pandoc-via-icml/

plafont

A new lead. I'll take it. Thanks.

Louise.Rouse

For bibliography, my workflow so far is:

In Zotero, sort by kind and select in middle panel, right click and export separate CSV file(s) (I'm doing separate files for books, journals, web pages etc.)

CSV files must be encoded Western character encoding so they can work with inDesign directly—UTF8 and UTF8-without bom break inDesign.

--(Although you can also open these CSV files up in excel and save as UTF16 TXT which is fine for inDesign but this is an extra step so I am only doing it for Japanese bibliography items that need full width characters)--

Make a text box.

Go to data merge in inDesign and add the CSV file as the data. Perform the merge. If you create paragraph styles with the same name as the fields you have inputted you can open the tags menu and do "map styles to tags", and "map by name" and then your bibliography will be beautifully styled according to your typography skills.
In the act of data merge, you can change the layout so you could make a small textbox and have indesign repeat it in a grid fashion across the page (more useful for making address labels than bibliographies... but will give you ideas for more complex layouts)

Ex magazine designer here... I can only write when I design in tandem. Scientists, you're missing a trick, inDesign feels like breathing to me, I could never write much without the structural logic that design gives me :) Peace.

emilianoeheyns

Wouldn't generating a bibliography in rtf by zotero give much better results? By going the CSV route your losing all the benefits of the built-in citation formatting according to the chosen citation style.

Louise.Rouse

inDesign doesn't accept rtf natively and the tags available in the above:

"Here’s a tentative list of preserved entities:

bold;
italic;
blockquotes:
footnotes;
headers;
paragraphs;
tables;
lists."


Are a poor substitute for the endless paragraph and character styles that can be created with csv mail merge where I can, for example make every Japanese book title appear within the correct 『』parenthesis and add 巻 and 節 as per my template, and not only do I lose all that, I have to do extra work of dealing with this extra tool to get it there...!

Bibliography aside, I have paragraph styles for captions, figure text(including perfect spacing between the textbox and the table), paragraph indentation, first line non indentation, drop cap, H1~6 equiv, all integrated with page level objects - baseline grids, layout grids, page numbering etc.

The only thing on this list that draws my attention is tables. Admittedly I don't know how to take an html table directly into indesign from a mass html document that might contain a lot of them without searching for some tool like this... but inDesign accepts excel spreadsheets directly and keeps them dynamic so for the number of tables I use (not many) I don't need a mass table import function.
https://redokun.com/blog/link-indesign-tables-to-excel-spreadsheets

Louise.Rouse

Or in other words, I would never bother to put bold and italic on the original document (natively, without tagging inDesign strips all of this to give you a blank design slate, independent of the vagaries of word processors.)

So instead, for better workflow in complex documents, I tag the the plain-text of inCopy with all the hierarchical (heading) and emphatic (bold, italic, underline) structures, and then design is a cinch and I can iterate design very rapidly because the logic of the visual hierarchy is methodically tagged rather than intuited or laboured over during production.

emilianoeheyns

I have no doubt indesign has better formatting options than word (but LaTeX though?), I'd just worry that your have to manually reconstruct what citeproc would usually do for you. To each their own I suppose.

Louise.Rouse

The average lonely hearts column page or movie review page has a far more complex syntax than a citation. You just set up the template once, add the tags, and the merge will replicate it a million times if so you needed.
And it’s integrated into the design which helps me to think across the thesis.
Just like a decently designed book, is infinitely more readable (visually) than almost any research paper. But if you’ve spent a career overcoming the obtuse nature of legibility in research papers (And conference posters don’t get me started...!) this is probably of little concern.