RTF Scan isn't recognizing citations without dates, or "in press"

jenagreen
Hello. I am testing out a workflow using Scrivener with Zotero, inserting citations using Quick Copy, and changing ( )s to { }s*. The first couple of tests I did using RTF scan worked perfectly. However I just tried citing a selection of papers, one of which is in press. The first time I ran it, it simply had a blank date field. The RTF scan found the other citations, but not this one. I then tried typing 'in press' in the date field in Zotero, and reinserting the citations. (The date appears as '0000' in the center pane, but 'in press' in the Info tab and when I insert the citation into Scrivener.) This didn't work either. Do you have any idea what I might be doing wrong? Apologies if this is a wicked stupid question.

Thanks in advance,
Jena

*I altered a version of the style I was using (APA with no DOIs or Issue Numbers) so that copying and pasting/dragging and dropping whilst holding Shift gives me an inline citation in { }s instead of ( )s. I don't know whether this could somehow be messing things up? I don't think so though, because RTF Scan has no problems reading the other citations, and I select the proper APA style for the RTF Scan.
  • adamsmith
    RTF Scan isn't all that reliable and has a number of bugs (e.g. it also doesn't recognize names with accents or other non ascii characters). If you want to seriously work with Scrivener, use this:
    http://zotero-odf-scan.github.io/zotero-odf-scan/

    We'll try to fix RTF scan, but especially with the alternative ODF scan now out, it's not a high priority.
  • jenagreen
    Ah! Thank you very much, Adam.
  • flips
    Hi! I'm new to Zotero, but aiming on using it for a lengthy academic paper, using Scrivener. It seems the way to do it is to use the RTF scan method on the document compiled in Scrivener.

    I tried both using a the RTF-ODF-scan plugin and the plain {Author Year} way.

    I actually prefer the the {Author Year} method.
    It does however seem to have trouble with special characters in the Author Name. (I'm thinking of characters like the Norwegian/Danish O with a slash: Ø.)
    So for all these links I have to manually map the links for each RTF scan.
    Then I found this thread, so I guess the ODF scan plugin is much more reliable.

    However, when I used the plain RTF style, it generated a nice bibliography at the end, and with ODF scan it didn't.

    Do I have to open the scanned ODF document in LibreOffice or something, or can I insert a code to have it generated by the scan?
  • adamsmith
    ODF scan requires going through LibreOffice at the final stage, both to select a citation style and to insert a bibliography.

    As per above, non-ascii characters are known to break RTF-scan.
  • flips
    Ok. That adds another step in my creation process ... Too bad RTF scan can't handle unicode/non-ascii ...
  • adamsmith
    well, the special characters would probably be fixable, but there are a number of other issues, such as no support for prefix/suffix, locators other than page numbers etc. that really make it unsuitable for serious academic writing without a significant amount of work.
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