extra linebreaks in bibliography

bdarcus
Using NeoOffice and APA, the bibliography includes an extra line-break between the entries. Spacing between entries should be handled using styling (paragraph-after settings); not line-breaks. As it is, I have no idea how to fix this.
  • sybille
    What paragraph style are you using in the bibliography? Specifically, how is the line spacing set?

    I think that what you're seeing may be the result of having the paragraph line spacing set to something other than single space. There formatting of the bibliography style adds a line to separate the references, and this is being added on to the double or 1.5 line spacing.

    I've just made a custom style for my bibliographies and added that to the default template I use. I have this style set for single-spacing, and it works just fine with APA bibliographies: items in the list are single-spaced and there is a single blank line between each item.
  • bdarcus
    I'm using a "bibliography" paragraph style, where I control the spacing.
    I've just made a custom style for my bibliographies and added that to the default template I use. I have this style set for single-spacing, and it works just fine with APA bibliographies: items in the list are single-spaced and there is a single blank line between each item.
    There should not be any blank lines between the entries.
  • sybille
    I'm just telling you what I've observed, which is that the bibliography brings with it a blank line separating the entries. I didn't know it wasn't supposed to be like that.

    FWIW, when I set the paragraph style for the bibliography to be single-spaced, the result looks fine and is correct for APA guidelines as I understand them. But of course that doesn't mean that it's correct as far as what kind of formatting the bibliography is meant to include (as opposed to the formatting of the user's styles).
  • bdarcus
    edited November 24, 2007
    The problem with the way Zotero does formatting now is it assumes users don't use styles to configure formatting. Everything is done with blunt presentational formatting.

    So rather than, for example, tag each entry with a style that includes line-spacing and space-after definitions (which the user can override of course), they just manually configure everything. So, to get the "proper" spacing, they insert an extra line-break.

    The problem is, this doesn't work well for people (like me) that do use styles, and I have to manually go back and remove the spurious line-breaks.

    Granted, this is not the highest priority problem (that would be the sorting bug I've run into!), but it's still a bug in my view.
  • sybille
    edited November 24, 2007
    I use styles, too. I just made my Bibliography style single-spaced with no added spaces after the paragraphs (and other things like a hanging indent, etc.). With that, the added lines haven't really bothered me.

    But I definitely see your point about preferring that the formatting come from user styles rather than be brought in with the bibliography data itself. If I remember correctly, there was a time when all of the references were inserted as one big paragraph, with "soft breaks" between lines - maybe the extra spaces are a carryover from that.
  • bdarcus
    edited November 25, 2007
    Quick followup, after inspecting the ODF file.

    So here is a fragment of the bibliography:


    <text:p text:style-name="P12">[entry]</text:p>
    <text:p text:style-name="P12"/>
    <text:p text:style-name="P12">[entry]</text:p>
    <text:p text:style-name="P12"/>


    ... and here is the style:


    <style:style style:name="P12"
    style:family="paragraph"
    style:parent-style-name="Bibliography">
    <style:paragraph-properties fo:margin-left="0.5in"
    fo:margin-right="0in"
    fo:text-indent="-0.5008in"
    style:auto-text-indent="false"/>
    </style:style>


    So, it's actually correctly encoded at the document level with a named style.

    The problem is that there's simply an extra empty paragraph.

    Also, a random thought: I wonder if the bibliography list should be, um, a list, with styling set not to display the number of bullet by default? Just something to consider for later ...
  • eckles
    This seems to be a general problem for bibliography output for all styles.

    It also impacts the Word plug-in, see http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/2252/

    It would be great it someone could please fix this.
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