Upgrade Storagertf scan problems with disambiguation in zotero 2.1 rc1
Hi,
I love Zotero, so I want to describe some problems/bugs with Zotero 2.1 rc1. I'm on mac, os x snow leopard, firefox 3.6, word 2011.
I have two books, some author, some year, different titles:
1. Turcan, "Cioran or the Excess as Philosophy", 2008 (book) and
2. Turcan, "Cioran and Religion", 2008 (journal article).
I put them in the footnote like this:
1. {Turcan, 2008, 44-45}
2. {AnotherAuhtor, 1995}
3. {Turcan, 2008}
A. FIRST PROBLEM. When the screen for disambiguation is shown, I can make ONLY ONE choice, for the both titles, so in the scanned rtf there will be just one single reference:
1. Turcan, Cioran or the Excess as Philosophy, 2008, 44-45.
2. AnotherAuthor, Title, 1995.
3. Turcan, Cioran or the Excess as Philosophy. (HERE I want the other title, Turcan "Cioran and Religion", 2008)
B. THE SECOND PROBLEM. If I don't have another title between footnote 1 and footnote 3, the scanned document look like this (the second remains unscanned):
1. Turcan, Cioran or the Excess as Philosophy, 2008, 44-45.
2. {Turcan, 2008}
C. THE THIRD PROBLEM. Why doesn't work at all the form with title between quotation marks, to eliminate disambiguation? For example none of these forms don't work (the scan process doesn't see them):
1. Turcan, "Cioran or the Excess as Philosophy", 2008, 44-45.
2. Turcan "Cioran and Religion", 2008.
Thank you very much,
Nicolae
I love Zotero, so I want to describe some problems/bugs with Zotero 2.1 rc1. I'm on mac, os x snow leopard, firefox 3.6, word 2011.
I have two books, some author, some year, different titles:
1. Turcan, "Cioran or the Excess as Philosophy", 2008 (book) and
2. Turcan, "Cioran and Religion", 2008 (journal article).
I put them in the footnote like this:
1. {Turcan, 2008, 44-45}
2. {AnotherAuhtor, 1995}
3. {Turcan, 2008}
A. FIRST PROBLEM. When the screen for disambiguation is shown, I can make ONLY ONE choice, for the both titles, so in the scanned rtf there will be just one single reference:
1. Turcan, Cioran or the Excess as Philosophy, 2008, 44-45.
2. AnotherAuthor, Title, 1995.
3. Turcan, Cioran or the Excess as Philosophy. (HERE I want the other title, Turcan "Cioran and Religion", 2008)
B. THE SECOND PROBLEM. If I don't have another title between footnote 1 and footnote 3, the scanned document look like this (the second remains unscanned):
1. Turcan, Cioran or the Excess as Philosophy, 2008, 44-45.
2. {Turcan, 2008}
C. THE THIRD PROBLEM. Why doesn't work at all the form with title between quotation marks, to eliminate disambiguation? For example none of these forms don't work (the scan process doesn't see them):
1. Turcan, "Cioran or the Excess as Philosophy", 2008, 44-45.
2. Turcan "Cioran and Religion", 2008.
Thank you very much,
Nicolae
Thanks,
Nicolae
The way it's implemented (there's a separate .js file doing most of the work) it would be very much possible for a third party developer to improve this. Without that (unless devs say otherwise), I wouldn't get my hopes up for this to see any improvements soon.
I'm waiting for a third party developer or learn myself javascript... In the meantime, I work with EndNote and rtf scanning feature, because I'm working on a big thesis and after 500 footnotes zotero becomes slower...
Nicolae
Nicolae
P.S. I also remember some discussions about RTF scan codes with regard to CSL/Pandoc, but I'm not sure where those found place.
P.S.S. I think I was thinking of this: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/pandoc-discuss/8wz2U2dzQJM/discussion
I think that improved RTF scan and the wonderful Gnotero (with appropriate small changes) would be just as smooth as what Papers2 is offering. And maybe the word processor plugins could then be convinced to detect and convert RTF scan codes as well...
I won't give this a try for a couple more weeks at least, but it should be fun.
I am trying the RTF scan feature out in the hope of being able to move to Scrivener for my writing, but I can't find advice on how to handle same-author-same-year ambiguities. If RTF scan has been improved and ambibuity handling is now possible, guidance would be much appreciated.
1. A style with no ambiguations: {Author, Year, "Either Title or Short title or some words of the title"#volume} (The volume is essential for disambiguation.) - I can do that.
2. A menu item for right click on a Zotero item named "Copy for rtf scan" or "Copy unformatted". - I can't do that.
3. An improvement of rtf scan function. - I can't do that, but I woul like to learn. Unfortunately I didn't find a good tutorial for beginners. I have a little programming experience in Java, with NetBeans IDE. What IDE need I for programming Zotero?
A propos, no news about rtf scan improvements in Zotero 3? I hate EndNote, but I love Scrivener (on Mac), and Zotero doesn't work with it.
Thank you,
Nicolae
3. The rtf scan is written in javascript, like most of Zotero, you don't need an IDE at all. But NetBeans would certainly work.
Although I have another usecase in mind: A big problem for people who switch from Endnote zu Zotero is the incompability of word documents writen with Endnote. It is discussed in the forum for years without any solution. (http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/1824/)
My idea is (given I have imported my Endnote library into Zotero):
1. write a simple output style in Endnote that just put Author and year in {} brackets as required for the rtf-scan.
2. remove field code in word and save the document as rtf
3. let zotero do the rtf-scan.
No. 1 and 2 is an easy task done in 15 minutes.
No 3 by now failed for various reasons:
a) I had problems with e.g. Authors that have a second given name. When I rewrote the style to only use the last name I ran into the problems with disambiguation mentioned in previous posts.
b) I had problems with various references in one citation (e.g. two books by two different authors). It would be useful to expand the rtf-scan syntax with a separator e.g. ";" for different works within one citation.
c) And even with the Authors rightly detected I had to learn, that the citation style of the created document can not be changed as it used to be possible with "normal" documents that have citations inserted by zotero. That is a petty because in many cases I re-use fragments of old texts for new ones. I think this should be possible since Zotero needs to detect the entry of the cited work anyway for the creation of the bibliography.
So I think it would be great and helpful for many people if the rtf-scan function of Zotero improves.
When you do get round to improving rtf scan, in addition to implementing requirement for unique identifiers, I would like to suggest that you should add a feature to the word & ooo plugins that will convert back and forth between temporary citations (used by rtf scan) and formatted citations (used by cite-while-you write). This is a useful feature in the EndNote plugin for Word (try the "update citations and bibliography" and "convert to unformated citations" functions in the EndNote plugin of Word for Mac).
Allowing to switch back and forth is likely not possible, because this won't work with multiple users working on a document - Zotero uses globally unique ids.
That said, some version of an identifier (likely optional) will definitely be part of an improved scan solution - note that for purists this already exists in the form of Zotero plain: https://bitbucket.org/egh/zotero-plain
So the RTF scan is for people who _do_ want to use Word etc. but _don't_ want to use CWYW (which has become much faster & nimbler in the 3.0b version). IMHO that just makes it a lot less pressing.
Anyway, optional identifier sounds good.
I disagree with your final comment about RTF scan being for Word users who don't want to use CWYW. The ability to switch back and forth between temporary citations and the CWYW citation objects within the Word plugin is a feature that affords a great deal of flexibility in how you write. You can choose to primarily write in any writing program using temporary citations (it would be Scrivener for me) and then when I want to share with co-authors I could export and convert the temporary citations to formatted CWYW objects with a formatted bibliography in Word (so they make more sense to my co-authors than temporary citations). After their comments/amendments come back to me I would convert back to temporary citations and import the document back into Scrivener. [EDIT: This is the workflow described on various forums by a number of EndNote users who don't use Word as their primary writing program but do write co-authored papers].
Off topic: Is it possible to quote from previous comments on this forum?
This could be ignored if there is only one matching ref entry or if it does not find the correct one, because it has been altered.
Together with the drag'n drop RTF-style this would solve the problem to integrate it into Google Docs or other software for the time being, until someone comes up with a more sensible solution.
RTF Scan on {ID, pg} would be so simple for lone researchers, or collaborators savvy enough to use a common database.
Further, something like {AuthorLastName_FirstTitleNonStopword_Date, pg} would disambiguate an awful lot of references, even for non-shared databases. Is it feasible to make RTF Scan detect such a concatenation?
I've tried to do what you suggest, but I'm not sure I got it right, since it did not work. I'm using Zotero 3.0.11.1 standalone.
I've added the prefix to the date in the rtf code, and tried both retouching the item date accordingly or leaving it like that: no hope. Not only it does not recognize the twicked inline ref, but it will ignore the author for all other ref hi may have in the rest of the text.
What did you mean exactly by "Zotero will kick these out nicely and separately"?
thanks,
Currently that's your best bet, it'll be a while until we get proper disambiguation implemented in vanilla Zotero/RTF scan