(Word) Document Preferences won't switch

jakob.dingel

Hi,

I'm having trouble when trying to switch between citation styles in word. Usually, I will see a progress bar and when it disappears, the document remains unchanged. At first I thought the problem was caused by endnotes that were not made using the plugin, but sometimes the plugin will successfully convert endnotes to footnotes. On the other hand, it will often not convert footnotes to in-text citation.
I'm a rather new user, so there might be something I'm misunderstanding. But I can't seem to find out what influences whether the preference change works.
On another note, I notice that the preferences when opened always default to Chicago Author-Date, no matter what has actually been selected. Is this normal?

adomasven

Zotero won't convert any footnotes or endnotes with citations to in-text citations if there is any other text in them. Even if the other text is empty space. If you're seeing something else, try reproducing it in a new document and explaining what you're doing, what happens and what you expect to happen instead.

jakob.dingel

Sadly, I'm still encountering the problem even in an empty document. I've inserted two citations in author-date format and converted them into footnotes, which was fine. I then converted them into endnotes, which was fine. But then I tried converting those endnotes into author-date format, which gets me a (non-specific) error message.
In the empty document, I can solve the problem by converting the endnotes first into footnotes and then author-date, which for some reason works.
In my actual document though:
-I will get an error message when converting from author-date (which until now was the default) to endnotes. At the same time, the conversion will still happen.
-the plugin will then frequently act as if the endnotes were already footnotes, showing that as the current preference while they are still formatted as endnotes, and not change the format. The same problem will happen when converting from footnotes to author-date if I do get them back to footnotes, for which I haven't identified a replicable pattern yet.

adomasven

Oh yeah, there is a bug when converting directly from endnotes to in-text styles that we haven't got around to fixing. It's best to not go directly to endnotes to in-text styles and vice-versa, and to do the conversion via footnotes.