Upgrade StorageTips on using Indexing by Automark with Zotero
Apparently I may be in a minority of 1 using the WORD indexing by automark features together with Zotero, but in case there is anyone else out there having problems with this, here are my tips. Feel free to give me yours.
Automark is a great facility to automatically add the index marks to a large document using a so-called ‘concordance’ file, which is basically a list of the terms you want indexed and the text you want to appear in the index. The problem is that it is not discriminating, so it will add tags everywhere it finds a word from the concordance file, including Zotero citation fields.
Up to release 5.0.88 there was a bug in Zotero that meant that attempting to refresh Zotero citations with index tags in them gave an unspecified error. Thanks to @dstillmann and the Zotero guys this is now fixed in the 5.0.89 beta version, so if you are having this problem you might want to get that version.
If you think you might have this problem with 5.0.88 or earlier, try the following: First turn off auto-refresh so you have control of when refresh runs. Then remove all the automarks by doing a global replace on “^d XE” to “” (nothing). Then do the Zotero citation refresh again. If this is now successful you know you have found the cause of the problem. You also have a workaround: When the document is ready for proofing first remove the automarks, THEN run Zotero refresh, THEN re-run the automarking and generate the index.
This workaround still suffers from the fact that there are indexing tags in citations, which you probably don’t want. From release 5.0.89 it will be possible to re-run Zotero refresh after automarking. When it hits a tagged field Zotero it will ask you if you want to keep changes to the field, so you can answer ‘no’ and get rid of the tag. The is tedious for a long document, though, because you have to do it for every citation with a tag in it. Zotero does not yet have an ‘apply to all’ option in this dialogue, but it has been suggested.
If, like me, you happen to be using a standard with citations in footnotes, there is a trick to avoid this tedium. After automarking but before the Zotero refresh, select all footnotes by putting the cursor in any footnote and keying A on a PC / A on a Mac to select all footnotes. Now do a global replace on “^d XE” to “” and it will delete tags in all the footnotes only. This procedure should also avoid the problem in releases 5.0.88 and earlier, but I have not tried it. Let me know if you do.
For an inline citation style, it may be possible to temporarily regenerate citations in a footnote style (e.g. MHRA3), do this trick then convert it back, but I have not tried this. It would be good if WORD had a “select all Zotero citations” feature, but I don’t know any way of doing this at present.
Automark is a great facility to automatically add the index marks to a large document using a so-called ‘concordance’ file, which is basically a list of the terms you want indexed and the text you want to appear in the index. The problem is that it is not discriminating, so it will add tags everywhere it finds a word from the concordance file, including Zotero citation fields.
Up to release 5.0.88 there was a bug in Zotero that meant that attempting to refresh Zotero citations with index tags in them gave an unspecified error. Thanks to @dstillmann and the Zotero guys this is now fixed in the 5.0.89 beta version, so if you are having this problem you might want to get that version.
If you think you might have this problem with 5.0.88 or earlier, try the following: First turn off auto-refresh so you have control of when refresh runs. Then remove all the automarks by doing a global replace on “^d XE” to “” (nothing). Then do the Zotero citation refresh again. If this is now successful you know you have found the cause of the problem. You also have a workaround: When the document is ready for proofing first remove the automarks, THEN run Zotero refresh, THEN re-run the automarking and generate the index.
This workaround still suffers from the fact that there are indexing tags in citations, which you probably don’t want. From release 5.0.89 it will be possible to re-run Zotero refresh after automarking. When it hits a tagged field Zotero it will ask you if you want to keep changes to the field, so you can answer ‘no’ and get rid of the tag. The is tedious for a long document, though, because you have to do it for every citation with a tag in it. Zotero does not yet have an ‘apply to all’ option in this dialogue, but it has been suggested.
If, like me, you happen to be using a standard with citations in footnotes, there is a trick to avoid this tedium. After automarking but before the Zotero refresh, select all footnotes by putting the cursor in any footnote and keying A on a PC / A on a Mac to select all footnotes. Now do a global replace on “^d XE” to “” and it will delete tags in all the footnotes only. This procedure should also avoid the problem in releases 5.0.88 and earlier, but I have not tried it. Let me know if you do.
For an inline citation style, it may be possible to temporarily regenerate citations in a footnote style (e.g. MHRA3), do this trick then convert it back, but I have not tried this. It would be good if WORD had a “select all Zotero citations” feature, but I don’t know any way of doing this at present.