RTL parentheses
Hello,
I love Zotero.
Lately, been looking at the option to roll it out
to all our students. When I add a hebrew citation
in Word 2010 I get parentheses that are backward,
like )this(.
Theres a thread from a while ago, but it didn't help.
I've read all the threads relating to RTL, and tried all
permutations of Word, Zotero version (incl MLZ), document
type, etc,
I would very much any help you can give.
Thanks for all the work!
David Burg
Lecturer
Ohalo Academic College
Israel
I love Zotero.
Lately, been looking at the option to roll it out
to all our students. When I add a hebrew citation
in Word 2010 I get parentheses that are backward,
like )this(.
Theres a thread from a while ago, but it didn't help.
I've read all the threads relating to RTL, and tried all
permutations of Word, Zotero version (incl MLZ), document
type, etc,
I would very much any help you can give.
Thanks for all the work!
David Burg
Lecturer
Ohalo Academic College
Israel
Thanks so much, but alas, it also didn't work.
I see that when building the Refences section,
the APAv6 is formatted slightly differently,
according to the lang. So I assume Zotero knows
how to differentiate between Hebrew and English.
Would it be possilbe to edit the style so that
the parentheses are reversed if the Language is
set to HE (or another RTL language), or are they
encoded in Zotero?
Could a custom style override this code?
I'm going to try to run Zotero along with Open/LibreOffice
and see what I get. I'll report back here later.
Do you have more suggestions I might try, in the mean time?
Thanks again for your time,
David
(If they do, then MLZ is behaving as designed, and we'll need to dig deeper. If they don't, then something is amiss and we'll need to dig sideways, as it were, to find the cause of the initial failure before going deeper.)
Also apologies for the length of this post. I wanted to be
thorough.
My Setup:
For convenience, I'm runnig WinXP w/ HE language pack inside a VM.
Using Portable Hebrew Firefox v21beta, Word 2010 all defaults set
to Hebrew, incl. OS variables. But the problem is also in Win7
with the same setup, otherwise.
I just reinstalled MLZ with the verison from 6th May, deleted the
Zotero folder and inserted the bibliographic information.
I do feel a little "off", since I had not changed the CSL in the
languages prefernces - did that now (UI was already in HE mode).
Not sure I understand "reverse to RTL mode".
I've uploaded a sample to my Dropbox, and shared it. The link is:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/71mfj43hjzojrig/ZoteroTry1.docx
Could you open it to see if you get the same problem (in Hebrew)?
Someething weird is going on:
Dropbox gives a preview of the file. In IE8(and WinXP) the
parentheses are backwards (like in WOrd 2010) but in FF
(and IE9) they are correct!
It seems there's a problem with Word?
However, saving to PDF (via Word or doPDF) gave the same result-
no matter the browser:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/l31xphju0s97odn/ZoteroTry1.pdf
As I stated a couple of hours ago:
I've installed LibreOffice (4.0.3.x) - and the parentheses are OK!
Any advice for Word?
Thanks!
https://bitbucket.org/fbennett/citeproc-js/src/54e0952d27e76231a319bce0dd70732af272b2c4/src/formatters.js?at=default#cl-69
There is an RTL character toggle in Unicode that could be set on RTL cites ("he" etc). That would probably be the first thing to try. It might force LibreOffice and Word to behave similarly with cites of this type. I'll try to take a look this weekend, and post again when I have something worth testing.
I was wondering if you had time (and luck) with this problem?
Please let me know if I can contribute some work.
Thanks again,
David
OK, I created a citation manually and then duplicated it before
translating the new one to Hebrew That way they are identical
in every other way. Here is the file: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5562791
[first time to use this, so I hope its OK...]
Can't find a place to attach a file here. Here it is:
http://imgur.com/6IOHTZy
Or, on my Dropbox:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5hlofojud5lbiia/ScreenShot1.png
Notice the pararentheses are backward in the Hebrew citation.
In the bibliography, the Hebrew citation came out LTR so I had to
manually change the paragraph setting to RTL. It's the same for
Open/LibreOffice so it's probably creating it according to the
word processor style. Anyway, it is not a problem.
Otherwise, the bibliography looks OK.
Have a great weekend!
Bye,
David
The last time I looked at this, I had the idea of wrapping RTL-language bib and cite entries in RTL on/off chars (which Unicode does offer as a hack for situations like these). I'm not sure how well the strategy will fare when the rendered citation output hits the word processor, but it's worth a try. I'll post again when there's something to show -- and feel free to ping again if you don't hear anything for awhile.
I was wondering if you can hypothesize this problem appears in
Word while it looks fine in LibreOffice?
Thanks!
It's possible that using force-to-RTL markup will produce uniform behaviour on both platforms, though.
First, I use OSS all the time, except when there's no alternative.
I totally endorse OSS(whenever I get the chance). Howeer, the
IT people aound here, either haven't heard about it, or belittle it
(free is not as good as paid, or some such nonsense).
Second, this is the reason I'm trying to emphasize Zotero, as opposed to
the librarians who think Mendeley is great. It is - but it not the
same...
On the RTL issue:
I'm not sure I understand your comments, but willing to test any fixes
you can try. My coding abiblities (such as they are) are not up to this task, but I can definetly test and troubleshoot.
Thanks,
David
Understood (and that quip wasn't meant as criticism!). I have a few other pending items on my desk today, but I'll try to dig into this soon. I'm really curious whether we can trick it all into working smoothly.
Just wondering how goes with the RTL?
[Hope I'm not bothering you...]
My ability to get my faculty to see
the light is mcuh higher if this can work.
My hope is that I can get even more people
(and maybe institutions] to use Zotero.
Thanks,
David
To test it, set the Language field of a Hebrew item to "he", then insert a citation into a document.
There are several possibilities: (a) it will make no difference; (b) the fail/not-fail behaviour of Word and LibreOffice will be reversed; (c) parens will magically start working in both environments; (d) things will just break. No idea which result you will get -- give it a try and let me know what happens!
I already tried that, but tried again.
Unfortunately no change.
Just to double-check: I just installed the patch.
There are no other settings?
Is/are there setting/s in the style file to override
the problem?
Thanks again,
David
I now see that the initial attempt failed because the RTL on/off characters were inside the citation parens (so they had no effect).
More soon. When a fix emerges, I'll bundle it up in the same plugin. There aren't any special settings -- when it works, it will just work.
(This fix is a hack: it forces the cs:layout parens on citations to LTR mode with an override character, always. That's unnecessary clutter in most cases, so we only really want to do this for RTL formatting in Word. But I can worry about that later.)
I wanted to get a new instance of FF+Zotero up and running,
just in case there was some problem eith all my experimentation.
I have FFv21-HE, with only 4 addons (Zotero, Word/LO integration, processor plugin) and Zotero MLZ has CSL set for HE.
There's no change in Word. LibreOffice is still OK.
on my test citation (made by hand).
Reinstalled the plugin - but no change in Word or LO.
I've made some adjustments to the install parameters and added some ugly marks to the formatting, so we can be sure that what should be happening is actually happening. The changes are in a temporary version of the plugin: install from here and see what happens.
The processor is now producing output that is as correct as it can be made, so when it kicks in we'll either find the problem is solved, or know that Word is doing something clever to break the formatting that we'll need to work around.
ask to restart (like most addons do). Maybe it's not installing
correctly on my system? Or maybe not kicking-in?
How can I check that it is actually working?
Also, I've been thinking - would it be useful if you had access
to a working system? I can setup a computer with a remoting
protocol (VNC/RDP/Teamviewer...).
To be clear - this is not a cop-out to do my part, which seems
(at least to me) to be the "easrier" part.
Just wondering if it might give you more information?
If it does work, it will be unmistakable in the output -- Chicago author-date in-text citation will have "X" before the opening parens, and "Y" after the closing one. If that doesn't turn up, and the item has "he" in the Language field, the new processor isn't being installed.
addons and this one shows up in the Addons menu in
FF (v10.0.104 is displayed). So I just assumed everything
was working, but there was a bug.
I've been using Portable FF as a test platform, so I could
easily rollback. I now installed the plugin on my production
platform: Win8+He MUI, Office 2010(in he), FF v21EN,
Zotero 4.0.8+ processor plugin.
English citations are OK, with X and Y flanking.
Now, in hebrew citation, I get the X and Y inside the backward
parens, and is not dependent on the language setting (he, en or
empty).
However, I;m not getting the X and Y, in Word, after installing MLZ.
So not exactly sure what's going on but it seems to be the
combination of portable firefox and Word!
Again, I assumed that since Zotreo was working in portable FF
so was the plugin.
Not sure if that can be fixed but I think the RTL issue might
be more interesting.
Apologies - should have tried this permutaion....
To recap:
Zotero 4.0.8+processor(test) works in Word.
Zotero MLZ 4.0m360+processor(test) doesn't work.
Any permutation of Zotero with protable FF doesn't work.
Please advise :>