Chicago note

blupton
I recently tried to export a "Chicago Style Note" and the exported version is incorrect.

This is what Zotero generated,

Paul the Deacon. History of the Lombards. Translated by William Foulke. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974.

This is a bibliography entry and not a footnote. Am I missing something here?

Thank you for your help!
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  • adamsmith
    The issue is just the author, correct? How is it entered in Zotero? If you have the author in a single field, it always gets displayed as is.
  • blupton
    Adam, thanks for your help. The issue involves the entire note. This is what a chicago footnote should like like

    Paul the Deacon, History of the Lombards, trans. William Foulke, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974), III.24.

    Instead, I receive this "Paul the Deacon. History of the Lombards. Translated by William Foulke. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974." which is a bibliography entry.
  • adamsmith
    How are you exporting this? If you just export using drag&drop or right-click, Zotero will produce a bibliography entry.
    With the word processor plugins you'll get notes when using insert citation.
    To export a citation (as opposed to a bibliography) from Zotero, select chicago note as a the Quick Format output in the cite tab of the preferences, then use the shortcut for exporting a citation -- see the shortcut tab, by default it's something like shift+alt+a
  • blupton
    I am exporting the note by a right click and selecting, "Chicago Manual Style" (Note) and then pasting the note onto pages (mac). This method has been working since I have been using Zotero, which has been for around a year. I just noticed the problem today.
  • adamsmith
    It might be that the style changed and now has a bibliography.
    Use my instructions above.
  • blupton
    I followed your instructions and received this: Paul the Deacon, History of the Lombards, which still is not a footnote. Has Zotero removed the footnote option?
  • adamsmith
    Yes it is - it's the short Note version of CMoS. For the long form version use the "Full Note" style.
  • blupton
    That worked! Thank you
  • slg-lc
    Are these instructions for 3.0.1 for Firefox? I'm having the same problem and I'm not understanding the instructions to overcome it. For years, I've been able to command-click (or right-click at work) on an item, select a style that gave me Chicago footnote format, copy it to my clipboard, and paste it where I needed it. Now I can only get Chicago bibliography format.

    I'm not seeing anything called Quick Format in the Cite tab.

    Thanks! I need to create some footnotes and don't want to do it by hand.
  • adamsmith
    The instructions are for 3.0.1 - but it should say Quick Copy in the Export tab, not the Cite tab.
  • slg-lc
    Ok, thanks, that worked.

    Is this considered an improvement, and is it permanent? I have a lot of non-expert users at my institution and they rely on the menus and drop downs to find what they need. Distinguishing between bibliography and citation is great, but is there a way that it's visible within Zotero itself?

    Are the instructions here for Quick Copy: http://www.zotero.org/support/creating_bibliographies the best thing to point them to?

    The information on Chicago Style at http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/chicago_style_versions is now out of date, but what I'd really love is if you could give us "note without bibliography." I don't even see it in the style repository as a legacy option we could add back in.
  • adamsmith
    Yes it's permanent. We think it's an improvement, as there is no real reason to have two separate styles, one with and one without a bibliography, that are otherwise identical - it also meant one more style to maintain.

    My suggestion would be to encourage use of the Word Processor plugin - Chicago footnotes are going to be wrong (i.e. no ibid, no shortened subsequent notes) anyway if they're using drag&drop.

    Yes, the Quick Copy Instructions are the place to point to. Both they and the CMoS site are in wiki form, so feel free to clarify/update them:
    http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/documentation
  • slg-lc
    Thanks. We're an an institution where we have to go through security reviews for any software updates, and keeping up with Zotero itself is near impossible. We're on the verge of getting permission to use 2.1.10 just as you've stopped supporting it. (I was trying 3.0.1 at home.) Also keeping up to date on versioning for your plug-in (and Word itself) would be near impossible. We also have people who use WordPerfect (don't ask!) and much of our bibliographic work involves pasting notations directly into Web forms.

    I still hope you'll consider some way to put something into a menu or dialog box that indicates how to get citations out of Zotero 3.x for Firefox.
  • adamsmith
    ah yes, I remember - Library of Congress...

    "I still hope you'll consider some way to put something into a menu or dialog box that indicates how to get citations out of Zotero 3.x for Firefox."

    I wouldn't know where, to be honest (context menus are (over-)packed already), and shift-drag seems pretty intuitive/simple to me.

    Alternatively, it would be quite easy to make an in-house copy of CMoS for you without a bibliography (i.e. restoring prior behavior). That would not be maintained and it wouldn't be hosted on the repository, but I'd be happy to make it for you if that's useful.
  • slg-lc
    How about when you right-click on an item or multiple items you've selected, or a folder, there was an entry in the dialog box right below "Create bibliography from selected item(s)/collection" that said "Create citation from xxx".

    Thanks for the offer of a style. I'll be in touch again if that turns out to look like a good idea.

    SLG.
  • adamsmith
    yes, that's what I mean with "The context menu is already packed" - there are a dozen or so options listed there already and, while this isn't my decision to make, I think adding more for what I consider a pretty marginal use case (although I understand it's important for you) is frankly not worth it. Having too many options in context menus makes the software less user friendly.

    Maybe shift-right-click could toggle that option to Create Citation... - Dan would have to say if that's possible.
  • dstillman
    If we relabeled the menu option, it could be done through radio buttons in the dialog that pops up: "Citation/Note" and "Bibliography". Shift-drag is certainly the quicker way to do this, though.
  • Newton Key
    OK. I have been moved over here with my query. I have installed the Word plugin (although that makes for an extra step if, say, we are using WordPerfect). But it sure seems a lot less intuitive than it was before. I barely understand it; little chance that I can teach it.
  • adamsmith
    "I barely understand it; little chance that I can teach it."

    I have a hard time swallowing that. It's two steps:

    1. Set the Quick Copy format to Chicago Full Note (or Chicago Note if you want short notes). (That takes a total of 4 clicks and has to be done only once: Gears menu --> Zotero Preferences --> Export -->Select the style.).
    2. Hold the Shift key while dragging.

    I'm confident that can be taught to anyone with a high-school degree within 3mins.

    @Dan - since this is apparently much more of an issue than we anticipated, adding a radio button would probably be a good idea, yes.
  • dstillman
    edited February 8, 2012
    To summarize:

    Note-based styles can define footnote(/endnote) entries and they can define bibliography entries. When a note style doesn't define a bibliography, "Create Bibliography from Selected Item" falls back to generating footnotes. There used to be separate Chicago note styles, one without a bibliography and one with, but that was redundant since the styles were otherwise identical, and maintaining them both was a hassle.

    The word processor plugins generate the correct form automatically based on what you're doing. If you're using "Create Bibliography from Selected Item" within Zotero itself, with the new style it will generate a bibliography. You can, alternatively, set your Quick Copy settings and shift-drag items directly into any text field to create footnote citations rather than bibliography entries.

    We're discussing ways to restore the ability to generate footnote entries via "Create Bibliography from Selected Item" when a note-based style also defines a bibliography, but that's a very slow way of generating these anyway.
  • dstillman
    Issue created.
  • slg-lc
    A radio button could work. You have to select your citation style and your output format anyway, so you think about all those output choices once, and then you're good to go until you need something else. If those can be visually offset from the other radio buttons somehow, so much the better.

    I realize this may not be the most efficient way to generate citations, but it would provide continuity for current user and allow occasional/new users to figure out what's going on w/o RTFM. It's also against what I understand of the spirit of Zotero to tie it's best open source functionality solely to a paid commercial product (MsWord), so I really appreciate your consideration of this or a similar modification.

    SLG
  • dstillman
    There's a plugin for LibreOffice/OpenOffice, so nothing is tied solely to a paid commercial product. As adamsmith noted, the plugins can do a more accurate job of this because of their integration into the document. But just to be absolutely clear, if you're not going to use the plugins, shift-drag does exactly what you want, today, and it's what we're recommending you use/teach even once this is addressed.
  • adamsmith
    It's also against what I understand of the spirit of Zotero to tie it's best open source functionality solely to a paid commercial product (MsWord)
    It doesn't. Zotero works with Libre Office and Open Office, restructured text via zotero-plain and LyX via the Lyz plugin. All of these are open source.
    I hope that we'll get better RTF support in the not-too distant future to support scrivener, word perfect etc.

    Using drag&drop has never and will never be as good as some version of word processor integration.
  • dstillman
    edited February 8, 2012
    We should probably mention shift-drag and the citation shortcut key in the Quick Copy section of the prefs, though—right now the citation shortcut is mentioned only in the Shortcuts pane and shift-drag isn't mentioned at all (other than in the online documentation).

    Issue created.
  • Newton Key
    (I guess I have to turn in my high school diploma.) I go to quick styles (and it is already on chicago manual of style, so I didn't ahve to change that), and, if I shrink my Firefox browser, I can drag selected references over to Word or WordPerfect, or Textpad, or whatever, and it drags my citations. Great. Works. But it is still Bibliographic not Note form. (If I do short note, it does last name, short title of book, but that is not what I want.) I will go read more documentation, but what I loved about Zotero was that you didn't need to read documentation. (I should note that yours has to be the fastest comments response section ever.)
  • adamsmith
    Hold the shift key while dragging.
  • slg-lc
    edited February 8, 2012
    So far, for me, shift-drag has worked terrific if I want to paste something into a Web form on the same page. But it's terribly unwieldly if I'm working in multiple applications. I have, say, 20 windows open in 6 applications and when I'm ready to add a new citation to something I have to keep bringing the target window up to the top, then find the Firefox tab with the open Zotero pane to get that positioned above the target window, and then I have to shift-drag (with a trackpad) from just the right place in the Zotero pane to just the right place in the target document, which is only partly visible to me because of the overlap of the windows.

    After I missed a couple of times I started dragging the citations into big blank spaces, and then cutting and pasting them via my clipboard before placing them. At that point, I was wasting my time, so the keyboard shortcut makes more sense for me. But a lot of otherwise intelligent people don't like keyboard shortcuts.
  • dstillman
    I don't know about Windows, but at least on OS X you don't need to rearrange windows—after the drag starts, you can use Cmd-Tab (equivalent to Alt-Tab), a screen corner (set to Exposé), or the Dock (roughly equivalent to the Windows taskbar) to bring other windows to the front. And you can let go of Shift as soon as the drag starts.

    This is getting a bit off-topic, though. We've said we'll add a citation option to the dialog for people who don't want to use shift-drag or a keyboard shortcut, so we can pretty much leave it at that.
  • Newton Key
    OK. Thanks. I can get a footnote again. I can teach that. (And I will go back to the Word plugin and figure out how to work that as well.) Notes are much more important (one writes papers with notes more often) than bibliographies for historians/students writing for history essays/journals/books, yes?
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