Upgrade StorageNeed to italicize part a title
This is an old discussion that has not been active in a long time. Before commenting here, you should strongly consider starting a new discussion instead. If you think the content of this discussion is still relevant, you can link to it from your new discussion.
(1) Take a deep breath;
(2) Open a clean Firefox profile for testing;
(3) In the new profile, install the development trunk extension and plugin;
(4) Add tags to a title field as described here;
(5) Create a document and insert a reference to the newly decorated item into it;
(6) ???
(7) Profit!
(Edit: I hasten to add that I do not speak for the core developers of Zotero, and nothing in the glib response above should be taken to reflect the views of the Zotero project or of its staff!)
Thanks for both your answers.
I will give the development trunk a try (albeit I won't let it anywhere near my working data).
Also, thanks for the (albeit understandably evasive) date you put on this feature.
@Frank
Am I right to assume that it is save to adopt the title field tags you link to in your post above (under 4)?
I've run into this problem too - I have taxonomic names of species in the titles of journal articles that NEED to be in italics. Is there a solution for this yet, or will it be in v2.1x?
Martin.
http://citationstyles.org/downloads/upgrade-notes.html#rich-text-markup-within-fields
If you're going to insist on a GUI menu you're out of luck unfortunately - generally something more novice friendly might be nice, but there are downsides to cluttering the GUI and it's certainly not high on the priority list of developers.
It's hard to say what's not working in your specific case w/o more detail - to start, both is would have to be lowercase - as in <i>Book Title</i>
This should work equally well in standalone as in the Firefox version. Enter the title so it looks like:
Citation or partition: subalterity in <i>A guide to Polish bibliographic practice</i>Then try again. If it doesn't work, right-click (control-click on a Mac) on the item in the middle pane of Zotero and select "Export this item". Select "Zotero RDF" as the format, and save the item. Then open the file and paste its contents here. Something funny is going on if it won't work.
As for the convenience of the current markup system-- it's not pretty, and we need to add more guidance on how to use it, but there's no way to do this without using some convention of some sort, and this convention is familiar enough to be recognizable for many.
(1) The markup scheme grew out of work by a bioscientist who, like you, needed to mark up species names. He had been inserting markup into fields, and then running a Word macro over his document to apply the formatting. We use the same tags (<i>italics</i> etc), but apply the formatting automatically when the citations are inserted into the document.
(2) The solution above is not yet polished, but it can be polished. The polishing will take some time. We hope you'll bear with us, but if you decide to revert to EndNote, check back from time to time, because with steady feedback from the community (of which we hope you will remain a member) this feature (and many others) will improve.
(3) If you are having difficulties with in-field formatting, please follow the steps indicated by adamsmith (edit: ajlyon [oops]). If we can look at your actual data, we will have a better chance of giving meaningful advice.
(1) I exported a set of records in RefMan (RIS) rich-text format to an rtf file.
(2) I opened that file in Word, then searched for italic formatting, then added the codes <i> and </i> before and after the italicized words (scientific names in this case).
(3) I saved this as a plain text file.
(4) When I open this in a plain text editor (I use EditPad Pro), I see the appropriate text with the <i> and </i> codes in the proper places, e.g.,
TI - Influences of predation risk and energy maximization on food selection by beavers (<i> Castor </i> <i> canadensis </i>)
(5) When I import this plain text file into Zotero 3.01, the records are imported correctly EXCEPT that the <i> and </i> codes are stripped off!
This would seem to be a bug in Zotero.
Thanks for your advice,
Steve Jenkins
If we lift this restriction, we'll probably still limit it to titles and abstracts, and only a small set of tags (italic, superscript, subscript, bold, underline)
Another solution to my original problem of importing large numbers of references containing italicized scientific names in titles from EndNote into Zotero would be to modify step 2 of my original posting to use codes to identify the beginning and end of an italicized block of text that are not html codes, so presumably wouldn't be removed by Zotero. E.g., I might use $$ at the beginning and $$$ at the end. Then, if Zotero had a global search-and-replace feature, I could use this to change $$ to <i> and $$$ to </i> in the Zotero database. Or, I suppose this could be done directly in sqlite. But this is all not very user-friendly. The best solution of all would seem to be enabling Zotero to import rich-text files in RIS format that can be exported by EndNote.
The actual solution for this would be for EndNote to export in any reliable, documented, and stable standard.
For example, the RIS text file with this:
T1 - Intrasexual aggression in <i>Metridium senile</i>
becomes this in Zotero after import:
Intrasexual aggression in Metridium senile
So, the problem is that Zotero does not import its own method for indicating italics in titles.
There are some refinements needed for production. The main point is that markup would only take effect when the title is rendered with form="short", and for entries that are mapped in the Abbreviations Plugin, the Short Title field is ignored. To address this limitation, there are two unofficial extensions to CSL to cover "real" short-form titles: virtual variables title-main and title-subtitle; and for greater flexibility, a hereinafter variable that can be set freehand in the Abbreviations Plugin.
A thought, anyway. Certainly keeping visual markup out of Zotero field content would be a good policy, so long as production needs can be met.
https://gist.github.com/raw/2335856/e28ca7fd32e70d0ddfa51740bb313b8b7df62cd9/RIS.js
Save this file (right-click --> save link as) to the translator folder in your Zotero data directory http://www.zotero.org/support/zotero_data
, overwriting the file with the same name.
Imports should work w/o html escaping immediately - if not, restart Firefox/Zotero and try again. The altered translator will get overwritten with future updates of Zotero so this is for a one-time import, but that sounds like it's all you need.
How to properly implement a permanent solution requires more thought, but I'm happy if this helps people to transfer their libraries.