Foreign characters not working when citing in Word

jelzan
When I use German on Polish diacritical signs in my references they appear normal but then get turned into boxes when I put a citation in Word. Any ideas? Thank you!
  • DWL-SDCA
    This sounds like a mismatch in character encoding. Ideally, I think that you want everything to be in UTF-8 (Unicode). You can set Zotero to UTF-8 in preferences. There is also a setting in MS Word to make that the default. The way to accomplish that in MS Word can differ by version. Instructions should be in the Word Help file.
  • dstillman
    edited May 6, 2013
    DWL: There are no Zotero settings that apply here. In the prefs you can set the export character set, but that doesn't have anything to do with citing. And I'm not sure there are Word settings that apply either—character set is generally an import/export issue, unrelated to the internal representation of the data within the program. (And it'd be limited to plain-text files, anyway. As far as I know you can't set character sets for Word documents.)

    Something is clearly broken, though. jelzan, what's your setup—OS, Word, Zotero versions—and how exactly are you getting the citations into Word? Via the word processor plugin, by copy and paste, drag and drop? What's an example of a citation that's getting mangled?
  • dstillman
    (This could be a font issue, but that shouldn't be the case with German/Polish characters if you're using a standard font.)
  • DWL-SDCA
    @dan I stand corrected about Zotero's treatment of UTF-8 encoding. Are you sure that this isn't an issue of MS Office getting confused ANSI 1250, ANSI 1252, and UTF-8? Older versions of MS Office were confused by material encoded one way when inserted in a document with default code page of another kind.
  • duncdrum
    edited June 4, 2013
    Not sure but i might have encountered a related problem. Using MLZ on two machines (laptop and desktop) with identical OS, System fonts, FF, etc.

    A supplemental B Unicode character U + 25B07 that i wrote into one of my notes on my laptop turned into an empty box on my desktop after sync? Any ideas on why?

    I tried to post the character in here, but that turned into an forums error. Doesn't look very promising.
    Technical information (for support personel):

    Error Message
    An error occurred while creating a new discussion comment.
    Affected Elements
    CommentManager.SaveComment();

    The error occurred on or near: Incorrect string value: '\xF0\xA5\xAC\x87' for column 'Body' at row 1

    For additional support documentation, visit the Lussumo Documentation website at: lussumo.com/docs
  • dstillman
    duncdrum: If this isn't related to Word, you should start a new thread.

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