Today the world flew past me almost unnoticed: I just finished a round of work on the law/multilingual style suite that involved some arcane adjustments inside the citation processor. Tomorrow is a good prospect though.
Okay. Nothing to show yet, but I'll start looking at issues with the plugin today. The use and abuse of abbreviations in the MLZ styles has shifted a little during iterations of style development and processor revision in the past month or two, and that may be the source of the difficulties with imports, we'll see. I'll also try to take care of a couple of the more egregious rough spots in the plugin UI (the lack of an OK button, and the immediate closure of the popup when Enter is pressed). More news soon-ish ...
Things should be fixed now. If you update or reinstall, you should get an OK button in the plugin abbrevs sub-popup, the plugin shouldn't close when you hit Enter in an open abbrevs field (the field will just close instead), and an import of exported data should work.
Data import is still a little rough in the UI, although it should work fine. The field entries shown in the sub-popup are not updated after import, so it might seem at first as though the import failed again. But if you close out the sub-popup and then the main WP popup with OK, the changes should be reflected in citations, and the changes will show the next time you open abbrevs.
Feel free to post again if anything fails or seems particularly awkward.
Thanks really great to hear, thanks for reporting back. As the plugin is starting to look useful, I'll start a fresh thread as a magnet for feedback and suggestions.
Best I know there is currently no solution available that doesn't involve at least some degree of tweaking (mainly on the side of the abbreviation list, the plugin is pretty smooth) I'm not keen to recommend this as a solution to anyone who doesn't have some time to tinker (and read through some discussion). We should have something smoother soon, once we have a couple of abbreviation lists up on a github account.
I have a more basic question about journal abbreviation: that is that it's never filled out!
This is driving me mad. I'm new to Zotero and so far it's amazing. But even though there is a category for journal abbreviations, none of the citations I imported from the web or the .pdfs that I had zotero search out the metadata for (which otherwise worked great) have the journal abbreviation category filled out.
Is there some way to have Zotero pull the journal abbreviations for all my existing citations?
Journal Abbreviations are only filled when they're provided by the database. When you get data from PDFs, it comes via google scholar or CrossRef, neither of which supplies journal abbreviation data. That's one reason why we caution against using that feature excessively - you're often better of getting the data from the publisher website (which often, though not always, does include abbreviations).
You could also just put this off for a couple of months. Zotero 3.1, due out in April, has automatic journal abbreviations.
While most folks work within a single discipline, use a core set of journals, and are familiar with the abbreviations for certain citation styles; there can be different journal abbreviation for the same journal with different disciplines and styles. Although the ISO and ISSN have established standards there are abbreviation conventions that are followed by some key journals.
Reference Manager allowed several different abbreviations to be stored with each journal but users needed to select the abbreviation that was appropriate for their particular current need.
Abbreviation issues can be more complicated than it might seem.
In the Abbreviation Filter plugin, and in the abbreviation code working its way into Zotero, abbreviation lists are tied to the style, and can be edited for fine-tuning.
Upgrade Storage
Data import is still a little rough in the UI, although it should work fine. The field entries shown in the sub-popup are not updated after import, so it might seem at first as though the import failed again. But if you close out the sub-popup and then the main WP popup with OK, the changes should be reflected in citations, and the changes will show the next time you open abbrevs.
Feel free to post again if anything fails or seems particularly awkward.
thank you very much. It works very fine for me. You have done again a great job.
Thanks!
edit 2013-03-06: there is now https://github.com/citation-style-language/abbreviations (for now without content, though)
This is driving me mad. I'm new to Zotero and so far it's amazing. But even though there is a category for journal abbreviations, none of the citations I imported from the web or the .pdfs that I had zotero search out the metadata for (which otherwise worked great) have the journal abbreviation category filled out.
Is there some way to have Zotero pull the journal abbreviations for all my existing citations?
That's one reason why we caution against using that feature excessively - you're often better of getting the data from the publisher website (which often, though not always, does include abbreviations).
You could also just put this off for a couple of months. Zotero 3.1, due out in April, has automatic journal abbreviations.
While most folks work within a single discipline, use a core set of journals, and are familiar with the abbreviations for certain citation styles; there can be different journal abbreviation for the same journal with different disciplines and styles. Although the ISO and ISSN have established standards there are abbreviation conventions that are followed by some key journals.
Reference Manager allowed several different abbreviations to be stored with each journal but users needed to select the abbreviation that was appropriate for their particular current need.
Abbreviation issues can be more complicated than it might seem.