Word citations have flipped parentheses )Trivers, 1972(

sigal
Since updating to Zotero 3 my citation parentheses have changed their direction. What should I do?
  • adamsmith
    odd - is anything on your computer indicating use of a left-to-right language (Hebrew, Arab, Farsi)?
  • sigal
    Yes. Hebrew. But this was never a problem. What do I need to change?
  • adamsmith
    You'll have to wait until fbennett comes by - he tweaked how Zotero deals with LTR languages and apparently something went wrong.
    What citation style are you using?
  • sigal
    No problem. APA 6
  • adamsmith
    Out of curiosity - could you try if this also occurs wit the style "American Journal of Political Science" from the repository?
    And you're writing in English?
  • sigal
    OK. I tried a few things. Political Science does the same.
    I think the problem is with the template I am using. It was probably in Hebrew although the text is in English. So if I copy the text to a new file made from an English template, then everything looks OK.
    It's just strange that this didn't happen with the same files and templates with the old Z version.
    Thanks for your quick assistance,
    Sigal
  • adamsmith
    I believe before the recent change people writing in LTR languages got the parentheses reversed - what you're seeing is an unintended consequence of the fix.
  • fbennett
    This change is the likely culprit. I don't work with LTR languages myself, so please be patient with me: I might be a little slow on the uptake.

    The first question is whether this is going to interfere with your writing. Are there language combinations (Hebrew cites in an English document, English cites in a Hebrew document) that become impossible to format correctly? If so, we'll definitely need to dig deeper.

    There are three possible contexts: parens in free text in the document, parens in field content, and parens set in affixes (prefix="(" and suffix=")") inside the style file. I take it that there is no problem with the first context (Zotero has no control over the document content outside of citations). For the other two, do you see the bad behavior in both the second and third contexts, or only in the second?
  • sigal
    I'm sorry. I don't really understand fbennett's post.
    I thought I solved the problem by using an English Word template, but now I started on a new project, and I see that if I paste an incorrect reference )Sundie et al., 2011( into a new file, it will come out all-right:
    (Sundie et al., 2011)
    as it does when I paste it here. But if I add additional references to the paper, they all come out incorrect. So I guess somewhere there is still info that I use Hebrew on my PC, even though the template is in English, and the whole paper is only in English.
    It seems like I need to change something in my Word preferences. Any ideas?
  • fbennett
    What do you mean by "template"?
  • sigal
    I mean that when you open a new Word file, you can open one of different templates. I thought that if my template would be an English one I would have no problems, but now I see that this does not effect the citations.

    If I insert a citation it comes out with backward parentheses )(, but if I copy it and paste it as text only then it comes out OK ()
  • sigal
    Sorry to nag, any news on this issue?
    At present the only thing I can do is to copy the text as text only - but then I lose the zotero fields.
  • fbennett
    First let's establish the context. This is happening with parens added by the style itself? What about parens that you type into the prefix field in the word processor plugin? Nothing in the processor should be touching the former, in any case, and the latter should only switch from parens to square braces; as far as I can see there's nothing in the code that would flip their direction. So it's a bit of a mystery.

    If only style-inserted parens are affected, you could just modify the style(s) for use on your system. Let me know if that's the case, and I can help walk you through the changes.
  • sigal
    THe problem is with style parens.
    When I use APA 6th style my parens come out backwards.
    So I tried other styles, and using the American Anthropological Asso they came out all right. The weird thing was that when I returned to APA style and tried to add new refs, they came out OK.
    Any ideas why?
  • fbennett
    I doubt that it was caused by anything in Zotero or the citation processor; it sounds like there was an internal setting in your OS or word processor related to RTL text somewhere that got stuck or confused.

    So the problem has gone away?
  • aurimas
    Any chance that this "hidden" setting (export.bibliographyLocale) has something to do with it?

    http://www.zotero.org/support/hidden_prefs#export_and_citation_settings
  • sigal
    Well, it is OK now in new docs, but in old ones I still have the )( and the only way to change them is by breaking the field links.
  • sigal
    export.bibliographyLocale was blank in my prefs, I changed it to en-US. It didnt effect the old citations, but I hope things will run more smoothly now. Thank you for that advice!
  • fbennett
    If in an old doc, switching away from the style, then switch back does not correct the problem, you could just produce a custom version of the style to run with those documents. That's not terribly satisfactory, but I still can't see how Zotero or the citation processor could be doing this; nothing about the RTL state is saved between sessions by either of them, so it has to be something funky with the document itself.

    If you're willing to do a small amount of work to fashion a custom style, the steps are described here. All you would need to do is reverse the direction of parens in the "prefix" and "suffix" attributes, rename the style and change its ID.

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