Broken document due to reference in image caption

edik05
At first: zotero is great! It helps me a lot and saves a hell of time.

If this isn't already known I might have found a bug: I've inserted a reference within an image caption see here: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/830/zotero.png/

After this I've got a lot of error messages each time I was trying to add another reference. Although zotero still was working! (but it was very annoying to click all those messages away).

So anyway I followed the advice to isolate the problematic citation and found it.
  • adamsmith
    that shouldn't be possible - Zotero should have warned you when you put a citation in a caption. Did you copy it there?
  • edik05
    Yep :o

    Now I know that this isn't allowed but if you DON'T know this and just do it you'll run into this situation.That's why I thought it would be useful for other users to know.

    Maybe the "How To in case of broken docs" should contain a list of such "DON'Ts" ?
  • adamsmith
    that's probably a good idea, yes. I'll add it when I get a chance.
  • adamsmith
    added this to the troubleshooting instructions.
  • PTQ_andy
    alright... I also did this since it wouldn't let me insert the ciation in the caption. I thought this was a bug and copied it there, but it simply wasn't dynamic anymore.

    Is it planned to support citations in captions or is there a major technical difficulty preventing it? It doesn't seem that too many people run into this though, I often use diagrams and images from others that just need referencing though.
  • adamsmith
    Is it planned to support citations in captions or is there a major technical difficulty preventing it?
    the latter I believe.
  • PTQ_andy
    edited January 23, 2012
    hm, too bad... this will keep many of my colleagues from adopting zotero then. Even though it is an anti-feature and thus bad publicity, this should probably be announced more blatantly, before people invest time to move their stuff to Zotero, spend more time adding things and when finally writing a paper they notice something like this.

    Not the nicest side of it :( - but the word plugin should state very clearly that it is limited... and not only say so on the troubleshooting page.

    I certainly didn't expect any limitations in that regard, a shame.

    PS:
    somehow the free competition manages to get this done with their word-plugins though. Pity. This out of nowhere is THE top feature on my feature-wishlist for zotero. I haven't written a single paper without copied material in images that need citations.
  • adamsmith
    I'm sorry, but the idea that Zotero should make a big point out of announcing every existing limitation, including one such as this which affects about one person every second months is rather absurd. No software does this, open source or not.

    If you're switching to Mendeley (which isn't free, it just doesn't cost any money) for its Word integration feature, you're likely in for a bad surprise. It's not very good. Among the limitations that they don't advertise is the fact that it's still not possible to create citations like Smith (1776) in author-date style.
  • ajlyon
    Zotero is the only free solution out there with any sort of serious Word integration.

    The limitation on image captions is rather small, and it can in many cases be avoided by using the quick cite function-- just set the Quick Cite style in the Zotero preferences, then drag and drop the reference into your caption (hold down shift for an in-text citation). You can then add the item to the finished bibliography with "Edit Bibliography". This will mean that the citation won't update automatically and it won't be numbered or show ibid behavior as expected, but the latter two are poorly defined for items not in the main text anyway.

    The documentation could provide more detail on what to do as a workaround, but it's hard to see this being more than a minor annoyance.
  • adamsmith
    edited January 23, 2012
    @ajlyon - quickcite won't do for numerical styles, unfortunately.

    (edit: as an aside, though - which publisher requires you to actually use word processor captions for your titles? Every journal/publisher I have ever submitted to wants figures and their captions as files separate from the article text)
  • Simon
    There is a major technical limitation that prevents us from doing this properly, which is that the captions aren't anchored to text. We could get around this limitation by treating all of the captions as if they appear at the end of the document (which is, as far as I can tell, what Mendeley does). This might be okay for author date styles (or it might not be, depending on whether you cite the same document in-text and where you cite it). However, I don't see how this would be any more useful for numerical styles, since the ordering is going to be wacky.
  • DWL-SDCA
    I may be stating the obvious but....

    This has different implications for manuscript prep and for "photo-ready" production.

    With ms prep , as adamsmith suggests above, figures are handled separately from the ms body. The author cannot know exactly where within the text the figure will appear and so cannot (for numbered styles) always get the order right. For example in the ms:

    ....As figure 1 demonstrates, the relationship is linear until 1990 but approaches exponential as electronicly published documents become more common.

    Figure 1. Title

    -------------

    include figure 1 about here


    --------------

    The caption text with reference marks goes here within the body of the ms text.

    With a numbered style the order is completely outside the author's control -- the figure could appear in print on a different page from the referral within body text. Fixing this should be the responsibility of the journal's copy edit process (and the author during proof).

    If the effort is to produce photo-ready copy, given the current state of word processing software, the author will always need to do quite a bit of manipulation of the text to make the document attractive. This manipulation will probably occur after the Zotero marks have been removed. Again, tedious renumbering may be needed. Until Zotero works well with document layout software, it seems to me that there will always be a need for final editing after Zotero has done its job.

    To sum up, I would rather Zotero focus on improving other things that affect bibliography management and writing workflow than to try to compensate for the shortcomings of other software. Particularly so when, as here, forces outside the control of the author and writing tools supercede.
  • andybrandy
    edited January 25, 2012
    the problem about locating the position of the caption and thus "order" in which citations should be numbered is obvious, BUT:

    It is only a problem if your citations style asks for numbering. It wouldn't be any problem if the citation style was something like

    • (andybrandy, 1990)

    • Brandy1990

    • Bra90

    This + ordering the citations alphabetically in the bibliography should work with ANY document and order.
    So. Could the developers not just allow inserting citations with the hint that only certain citation styles can be used in the case?!
  • adamsmith
    1. That's incorrect. Many author-date styles have special requirements for the first time an item is cited (e.g. APA lists more authors before et-al for the first citation).

    2. For those styles, just adding the items using quick copy as noted by ajlyon above isn't hard. You can add them to the bibliography using edit bibliography

    3. The ability to switch citation styles is an important and crucial feature of csl and Zotero - you really don't want to introduce a "feature" that breaks that for some citation styles.
  • Simon
    edited January 25, 2012
    The next LibreOffice plug-in won't break on citations in text frames, and will allow inserting citations into text frames, with a warning that they will be formatted as if they're at the end of the document.

    In Word, we don't get the fields from text boxes automatically, so this would require larger changes. I'm not convinced it's worth spending the time to implement this there, since it's going to be perpetually broken.
  • marsh
    Has anyone tried inserting the citation in the document but outside the caption, and then changing the font of the citation to "hidden"? Meanwhile, type the citation manually into the caption.

    This seems a reasonable workaround, if it works.
  • adamsmith
    if you just want to add a citation that's not inserted via the plugin to the bibliography, use "edit bibliography" (and then manually type it into the caption - or use ctrl-alt+a (PC/Linux) and paste from Zotero) no need to work with hidden font etc.
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